You Don't Get Owt For Nowt.

No recent posts lately, as I'm currently stuck in Yorkshire halfway through a two week training course in Video Journalism organised by the Press Association Editorial Centre.

It is without a doubt one of the most taxing things I've ever done and makes digital photography look as easy as turning on a lightbulb in comparison. The course has so far consisted of information being force-fed at Guantanamo levels as I and my hapless trainee colleagues beg for mercy, scribble endless reams of notes and navigate the byzantine technical menus of High Definition video cameras and digital video editing software.

My head hasn't hurt this much since I was revising for my O-Levels. The second week is set to be even harder, the course cost me an arm and a leg, and I'm already thoroughly depressed for all kinds of reasons which I won't bore you with.

So it's hard going.

A small silver lining on a fairly large cloud (yes, it's raining up here as well) is that some of my coverage of the London Bombings was selected for the forthcoming BPPA Press Photographers Year book, which is set to come out later this year.

So why am I arse-ing about with video cameras? Well, I've posted on several occasions my take on the changes in photojournalism due to digital capture. Some of those changes have been good, some bad, and some have yet to play themselves out.

What does seem clear though, is that traditional newspaper audiences are inexorably gravitating towards the Web as their main source of information and news, either at home or on mobile devices...and the tipping point is already on the horizon.

All of the Video Journalism course candidtates alongside me are journalists from local British newspapers - because those papers understand it's vital to engage with their local audiences if they are to survive at all, and if their audience is going on the Web, then those journalists and papers MUST follow.

I've been listening to the same old excuses being given by photographers about the 'decline of photojournalism' for years now. Indeed, I've griped about it myself, and have been badly affected by those changes sometimes.

Most of those gripes come from the reality that a lot of material photojournalists produce simply has no viable outlet anymore (if indeed it ever did have), at least in print, and sometimes its debatable whether the audience wants to see it at all.

In many cases, the reaction to this audience disengagement is that photojournalists have disappeared up their own arses, producing images simply to obtain the next grant, or win the next high profile competition.

It's a hall of mirrors going nowhere...at least, for the audience.

Apart from satisfying a small chin-scratching constituency of visually literate peers, one has to wonder what good these images are doing.

The last time I looked, photojournalists were supposed to be in the mass communication business to advance some humanistic aim, not in the self-expression business to achieve a mantelpiece full of shiny trophies.

If as photojournalists, we intend to continue engaging with an audience in a meaningful way, we currently have two options. We either start thinking about how we effectively communicate with them, wherever they may be - or we put our cameras down and do something else.

For the very reasons of change I've stated above, my own photojournalistic activity has been in stasis for a while. It was intensely frustrating, but gave me the opportunity to engage in some thinking and planning...because as far as I'm concerned, I'm in this for the long haul, and you'll have to prise my cameras from my cold, dead hands before I pack it in.

So I decided to train to reach an large audience which probably doesn't even exist yet, for a media which doesn't exist yet either.

But in a few years, I think it will, and I'd rather roll the dice on that, than pursue a method of audience communication which shows many signs of withering on the vine in its current form.

Comments

[Sean Parsons]

Plug away Sion and congrates on the Press Photographers Year.

This link has an article that may interest you.

http://donatacom.com/papers/pomo3.htm