What's the secret

http://www.lightstalkers.org/how_do_you_pay_the_bills

Hey
I don’t know why but I am disappointed in talk to you saying Hey Stupid…
I did know about the linked post. The problem is that a most of the answers there are about people who is changing from journalism to graphic design, photo service, printing. The question remains how we will going on in photojournalism?

It will get easier after all the others change over to graphic design, photo service, printing…

Seriously, at least in the US, newspapers are cutting costs while losing quality and therefore accelerating the loss of readers and ad revenue. Once the papers go away, and they will for the most part, we’ll be left with magazines and online publishing, which in fact has the potential to reach more viewers at a lower cost of distribution than print media.

What this all will mean, I think, is that there will be fewer people able to support themselves doing full time photojournalism. But the ones who can survive in the business will hopefully be the most talented and innovative.

eh, Buona sera, Antonino.

As Noah says its not just a problem in Italy, but also the US, UK and probably globally. For myself I’ve found diversification is the answer. Today I worked for a UK national broadsheet daily newspaper but tomorrow I’m an events photographer-something I would never have considered a few years ago, but it pays better than being a photojournalist! I’ll be a PR photographer the day after then who knows-maybe a photojournalist again after that for a few days.

Global belt-tightening means nothing is certain at the moment. I’m hoping we will come through it and who knows-maybe things will improve and we could have a new renaissance like the one in the late 1980’s here in the UK when The Independent was launched and suddenly people realised that photos in newspapers could be a selling point and not just smudges to break up the stories!

I have no idea how we will go on. Yet another award winning, revolutionary, trend setting organization with which I grew up and cross-pollinated, died last week. The list is so long these days it’s scary, to anyone without a diaper. Pardon me while I check my stupid email.

hi all

i read about crofters in northern scotland and they survived their harsh conditions by being flexable. fished when fishing was good sheared sheep when that was needed etc. point is that we need to learn lessons from this as photojounalists.j

Er, I hope it wasn’t this one :-(

http://www.abandonedcommunities.co.uk/page39.html

i hope not, point is that we need to learn (to be flexable)lessons from this as photojounalists.j

Flexibility is fine and dandy. I’m so flexible these days, I can almost bend over and suck my own stupid self. Doesn’t help when the organizations for which I work are stiff as a board, and going extinct because of it.

That’s what I mean stupid… As in Italy there are editors so blind and closed that allow to work only at firends, and other that pay very very lowest price for photos you spent a lot of time and money…
Thi is the reason of my questions in the post.

Buona sera a te john Watts Robinson.
Do you think we need to have a feudal profession John? And who will be as MacLeod? No, the problem is that there are people like me that are suffering just with the idea to be forced to leave, to change. Because maybe they don’t have other ways or other reasons…
I think the photojournalism needs some unusual choice and decisions.
I never seen a flexible lawyer, or a flexible gynecologist.

Hi Antonino. I was asking the same in a spanish spoken forum. No one knows the secret. There is not one i think. As latin american I listen all the same stories about working in whatever to continue doing what we like. I did that in my youth but now in my 41 will be very hard to back again in that system to drive my economy. I supose that John talk about flexibility because we have to learn about video or have to do pics in weddings or things like that.

There’s an old Chinese saying something about, “Those who speak do not know. Those who know do not speak.” There are no easy answers to the question. Personally, I think we need a five year moratorium on photojournalism “education” – whatever that is. Colleges are still grinding out PJ graduates and frankly there’s not much for them to do. Yet the colleges keep sending them into the marketplace. Meanwhile, newspapers – once the training ground for young PJ’s – are shrinking at an alarming rate. On top of that the amount of rights grabs, thefts and other problems for photographers are troubling. The great photographers will rise to the top despite all this and make a go of it. They will figure it out. The best always do. The question is what will happen to the rest?

One thing is absolutely clear, no matter how stupid it seems: print is down, web is up.

And web is motion, not stills.

Ergo, the new photojournalist is a videographer who knows which still frames to pull from video, and how.

As in Mediastorm.

Hi Antonino,

Since I am not a photojournalist, I cannot relate anything relevant as one, but I am posting because I have found a farewell letter by someone who was the director of Christian Education of a church I used to go to. She started her letter saying that she recalled that there was a saying in the reception area attributed to the founder of an investment firm where she got her first job out of college. The saying was that good or bad, things will change.

I think, depending on a profession, the amount of change you have to deal with will be different. Regardless of fields, only the top talents will be able to do things in a traditional fashion. The rest of us have to struggle and mix a variety of things to survive. Please note that the former church director of Christian education apparently started out at an investment firm after college and now an associate at a church organization, doing administrative work involving many churches in the mission projects and lobbying with the state, none of which involves traditional Christian education.

Perhaps some of us will do well doing more than just photography. As for myself, I am moving from Baltimore, Maryland, USA where film-based photography is almost impossible to do to Vienna, Austria where there is still a prolab processing E6, and I am adding my music to photography to make it multimedia. I had not planned on becoming a multimedia person, but I have been training as a musician as long as I have been at shooting and selling fine-art photos. I figure that going to Vienna will give me an audience I could not possible have in Baltimore, namely Japanese tourists, for which I am after.

A gargantuan gamble, one which I applaud, as hard as I am stupidly able!

Please keep us posted on your progress. Thanks!

One could always get a job drinking wine and reading faded newsprint to your dog as he busies himself in the boneyard

Got a stupid application form link for that?

http://www.lightstalkers.org/holysee

I have to say that I got more positive feedback on the concept from a young person working for a Japanese tour company, catering to budget-councious Japanese tourists than an older person working for an established major tour company in Japan, which caters to rich Japanese tourists who go to Europe for classical music.

My present hurdle is to clean up my accumulation in my house to make the house clutter free so that it is put on the market soon since I need the proceed of its sale to undertake this venture. I won`t know whether my gamble will succeed until next summer when I plan on scheduling this multimedia concert regularly.

This is directed at Antonino. I have learned in the course of researching for my move that EU citizens are free to move and to set up their businesses at a location of choice. Many students will go to another country to study at universities, for example. Many businesses are moving also. It would be much harder for Americans or Japanese to do this. (In my case, I am taking advantage of 6 months allowed without a visa in Austria for Japanese citizens, and if one times this 6 month limit at the latter half of a year, one can extend it to the following year if you reenter Austria from non-Shengen countries like Japan in the beginning of the next year before I have to have a work permit/resident visa.)

I hope perhaps some LS members, who have moved from a country of their birth to a country of their choice within the EU, will comment on their experiences.

SP – I don’t necessarily disagree with your concept of PJ’s becoming video savvy, but it’s terribly expensive to get into. The only ones who can really afford to do it are the staff photographers like at Wash Post or Dallas Morning News who are financed in equipment, software and training. Is MediaStorm paying anything to independent PJ’s for their work? I don’t know – I’m asking. Brian Storm’s a great guy and his site is top notch. I’m just wondering about the business model for how this works. Again, I’m not disagreeing with the concept just how you make it pay.

I can say the same thing of John Robert Fulton Jr. In latin american the multimedia inclusion in the newspaper will be a massacre. I am calling for some organization between photographers to get founds for make some workshops because is better a union that try to get alone the way to learn the new ways to comunicate. Anyway, I think the still image will be a king forever. If you remember something, is a video or an image? think about that.

John, I don’t have any stupid experience with Mediastorm, but this may answer your questions:

http://mediastorm.org/about/careers.htm

seems that i upset people when i used “crofters” as a role model. i used the term as a verb as best as i understand it, simply being “changing with the seasons”. feudal system? it’s outside of the use as i intended. j

Hi to everybody. I’m a free lance photographer but also (forced) writer and journalist. Normally I write for other sector for paying the reportages and travelling. It is not the best solution, but for the moment it works. Today a journalist, a friend of mine, told me: “the future is the video. Photography is dead”. Reading your post I feel really sad: I thougth that just in Italy our job was so difficult, a country where only few agencies (and photographer as well) work…