Alan Mutter, a former Chicago Sun-Times and San Francisco Chronicle executive who now runs a new media company, believes that newspaper photographers face a bleak future. They're an endangered species, he writes, because amateurs are increasingly having their work reproduced. "Time and again in recent years, private citizens equipped with cell phones and simple digital cameras have beaten the pros with faster, often better and frequently exclusive pictures of breaking events. The phenomenon is so common that it's old news."
Pointing to the decision by Associated Press to establish a formal relationship with NowPublic.Com, he argues that properly authenticated photos and video clips soon "will flow into the mainstream news stream about as fast as stuff from accredited pros."
Mutter writes: "Because citizen shooters vastly outnumber professional journalists - and they're increasingly aware of how to get their work published - it stands to reason that they will begin scooping the pros on more and more breaking news, thus rendering staff photographers substantially superfluous."
Though staff photographers will be needed "in the foreseeable future" to shoot features and the odd video, those skills will soon be usurped by citizens (and reporters).
I think Mutter is right. "Monkeys" are the new dinosaurs, are they not?
