Wade, it is a terrible painful truth that newspapers are potentially in their last throws of life if the newspapers owners and their senior management do not do something radical pretty soon.
The problem is online rules – whether we like it or not; and newspapers only have themselves to blame.
The major publishers of the world, initially under estimated online; they then rushed to online pouring in, and at the same time, wasting 10s of millions of dollars thinking click advertising would pay the way… Naive and stupid one could readily say. But this naivety and stupidity is the reason great journalist and equally wonderful news photographers are losing their jobs.
They still haven’t worked out that they need to abandone click advertising; charge for an ad in the traditional method; and put up pay walls.
The Australian is now doing this, and hopefully it is not too late for this conservative broadsheet. They also need to interlink the subscriptions so you pay for a newspaper sub and you get online for free.
There are great examples such as the Wall Street Journal the one-time highest subscribed online financial news website in the world; and even to a smaller extent Australia’s own propertyreview.com.au – it has been a subscriber only publication since 2006 and advertisers pay traditional ad rates.
It’s not too late, thousands of jobs can be saved where those wonderful photogs and journos remain gainfully employed for decades to come… The only thing that will stop them is poor management — and maybe they should be the ones to go in the first instance for stuffing it up so badly!

I could not agree more, Wade…but even then have experienced moments in the analogue photo age, where I couldn’t resist “tickling” an image by altering it but slightly.

In the late 1960s, while spotting a black and white print of a street photograph to remove dust marks, I noticed that there were a few bright higlights in a gutter. These looked like nothing more than dust on the negative, but were in fact discarded cigarette butts.

The dilemma: leave them in, where as a bright highlight they would distract the eye from the main subject and also wear the criticism of my peers for not bothering to spot properly, or remove them. I spotted them out.

In hindsight, I guess I’ve tampered with the historich record in removing what was a much more common element of the gutters back in those times.

This reminds me of a story recently at at the Queens dinner at CHOGM.

When the official photographs were released, the photo of Sri Lankan President Rajapaksa shaking hands with the Queen was not found, perhaps due to an oversight on the part of the official photographer.

Only the photo of Mahinda Rajapaksa shaking hands with Prince Phillip was available. However, on October 29 nearly all the local media carried a photo of Mahinda Rajapaksa shaking hands with the Queen.

It was the discovered the Presidents media unit had doctored the images to comical levels.
Here is a link to the photos. With the final (doctored) image being the one released to local media by the Presidents media unit.

http://www.lankaenews.com/Sinhala/news.php?id=18615

Thanks Ted. You make some good points regarding the universities, in my opinion.

Wade, you make some very valid points, but I do not agree with your veiled premise that today’s journalist is better than yesterdays. In fact, that is far from the truth.
Today’s journalist is usually from a ‘cookie-cutter’ University structure and many young journalists do not practice journalism but ‘churnalism’. Most are very poorly trained.
Gone are the days when a journalists skill is honed through a cadetship working alongside an experienced senior journalist, who knows their craft and passes it on to the younger journalism cadets.
Today, in many ways, it is the blind leading the blind.
Don’t get me wrong there are some superb young journalists coming through the ranks, however, many would not have gained jobs in journalism once upon a time. Further, many young journalists are heavily politicised from their University experiences. They have a point of view and they won’t change those views (it blatantly comes through in their writing).
Journalism today is a pale relative of its former self.
Yes, newspapers have suddenly realised there is a serious decline in the quality of journalism and are slowly attempting to address the demise of journalism by bringing back a greater emphasis on cadetships, but for more needs to be done by publishers to correct the demise of journalism.
Yes, many of these kids can write, but hey who can’t re-write a press release? Many, many stories we read in today’s mainstream press are off the back of a ‘presser’ or feed by a PR hack. More often than not two sides of a story are never revealed.
Photojournalism – In so far as photographers are concerned, there are many, many great photographers working in newspapers. Why? Because it’s a far more skill based profession, and those who make it as news photographers do so because they have a natural journalistic eye. They have great teachers who for the most part remain in the industry, but this is also changing as newspapers cut back their teams of photographers.
The decline of journalism in Australia will continue until publishers take a greater responsibility in the training of young journalists (and photographers). They cannot and should not rely on the churn rate of Universities, who are only interested in fees, and not whether a young kid is suited to a career in journalism or who has the ‘natural’ journalistic abilities.
The criticism of journalists by the general public is valid and will continue to be whilst publishers rely on ‘cookie-cutter’ journalists out of the University model of journalism.

Disclosure: 30 years media veteran as a journalist and media advisor. Sometime photojournalist. Completed a traditional cadetship in the 1980s with AAP.

I think we are in agreement. Im probably not explaining myself properly, I mean anti photography in terms of breaking from tradition. Photography seems to be stooped in rules around what makes photographs interesting. Gursky seems to break all of these rules and as you rightly put it using the medium “in a different way”. Daido Moriyama did something similar with his book farewell photography which casts aside all conventions of photography. Both conceptual and both respected in art world. Paul Graham has already published an interesting essay on the Art world and how it treats conceptual photography different to photography for photography’s sake: http://www.paulgrahamarchive.com/writings_by.html
. That is part of the reason why Gursky’s stuff goes for big dollars.

And with regards to the photograph being timeless I was talking in terms of there being no car, colour, fashion, advertising, architecture to date the photograph.

I wouldnt agree of it being anti-photography, for what is photography to begin with? He has used the medium in yet another different way, portraying its use, as yes, id agree maybe as a painting, like most of his work printed large to compete with and be acknowledged by painters, it is conceptual.

All photographs are timeless, are they not? The rules, broken? Regardless of the editing, man is still very much the point in this photo. But the more I look at it the more i want to remove that white piece of paper on the grass in the foreground!! =D

You make some good points there, Richard.

There is a lot of gursky stuff I like. I saw his work at gallery of NSW a few years back. The supermarket pic was epic. They need to be viewed as intended, printed large to really appreciate them. Thing is this photo is anti photography. It breaks all the ‘rules’ of photography and what makes a photo interesting. I almost don’t see it as a photograph, there is no time stamp and therefore it is timeless. It’s more like an abstract painting.

As for it’s price tag I wouldn’t pay much attention to that. It’s well known that galleries, collectors and even the artist themselves will bid up artists they collect in order to increase the value of the collection they already own – see Damian hirst, who along with a syndicate purchased his own diamond skull. I watched a show on a Warhol collector that would pay through the nose for a wahol in order to increase the value of the warhols he already owns. If they go cheap all his investments devalue.

Well…its good to see photography being recognized as a medium of expression by collectors who can afford it, id certainly pay a few quid to go view the vintage!