CNN purges staff photojournalists

[jky]

... would you say then that a pro pj's best bet are long term projects? That's something that Joe Blow down the street with a camera phone does not have particular access to...

 

[jan normandale]

I've deliberately chosen to shun papers, employers and companies that substitute amateurs and beginners for pros. Would you let your doctor's receptionist diagnose and prescribe for you? Would CNN's executive?

So bait and switch for the advertisers is fair game for CNN. Tell advertisers they are a professional organization but they lie they use non professional staff. I shun them and all their confreres. I will support those who do not practice or employ these ethics. It will take a while but the likes of CNN will reap what they sow. Continued declines in viewers, corresponding declines in ad rates until they fail. The management always blames the employees and never look in a mirror. Management and CEO are supposed to be leaders. They are not. The janitor can do their jobs.. for 1/100th of the pay. They better look out.

BTW: the shareholders are long term losers in this game. They just don't realize it yet

 

[Leigh Youdale]

The janitor can do their jobs.. for 1/100th of the pay.

Well said. I was visiting a large utility company a year or two ago and came across a door with a sign that read "Director of Janitorial Service". I cracked up and laughed out loud at this joke. Only to discover that it was no joke. Just about everybody in the organisation was a Director or Vice President.

 

[Roger Hicks]

In order to improve our service to you.... We're going to make our service worse.

Banks, tax offices, police... They all do it.

Cheers,

R.

 

[Gabriel M.A.]

Don't miss the point here. A photojournalist attaches context, meaning, reportage. There is an implicit trust. A known compass point. A picure, standing alone, can be maniuplated outside any context.

Yes, but a vetted "who cares!" to shareholders is obviously good this fiscal year. If most companies in the U.S. had thought about long-term instead of short-term megabucks, they wouldn't have outsourced all their manufacturing power overseas. There is no social responsibility, only CEO bonus responsibility.

 

[emraphoto]

In order to improve our service to you.... We're going to make our service worse.

Banks, tax offices, police... They all do it.

Cheers,

R.

awesome, love it Roger.

for the record, i have seen a few photojournalists/journalists run in the same direction as the sane folk (including myself on occasion).

i don't for a second believe that responsible, professional photojournalism or storytelling is over. the market was severely bloated with some serious mediocrity and needed the purge. where i have a problem is the choice to abandon the folks that have really put it on the line to provide content. for anyone lucky enough to be billing and getting assignment work, the behaviour of a lot of media outlets etc. in the past few years has been piss poor to say the least.

stringers, who generally work with little to no budget, are out with zero security or resources to mitigate risk and beyond a few outlets, the pay is miserable (if you can get it). this is a shameful and dangerous situation.

in the early fall i was in a region where fighting had erupted. it wasn't the sort of fighting that is predictable or with any sense of control. it was very fluid, unpredictable and very dangerous. i met at least 1/2 dozen freelancer/stringers working away with no insurance, resources for security, body armour/helmets or any hope in hell should they be detained. these folks are everywhere and the media is gobbling the cheap images up. no more day rate. no more expenses. $100, again if you are lucky, for an image that involved risking life and limb to get. everyone is aware of this and it disgusts me.

 

[dave lackey]

CNN, as well as the others, drive me crazy. I agree with the bad future trend when news reports are in the hands of non-professionals.😱

I also hate the political bias of each of the cable news programs.

But one thing is disturbing...not only are the TV screens filled up with so much graphic displays that you can't see half of the reportage, but now they spend so much time with social media quotes as to be nauseous. THIS is professional reporting? A bunch of kids tweeting and facebooking whatever is on their impressionable, inexperienced minds?

The world is in a spiral downward in so many respects. The world of journalism will take two paths eventually but that will only happen when the professional journalists decide to make that path a reality and own their own news channel/publication.

 

[emraphoto]

i agree Dave. ownership is an idea for moving forward. feel free to toss out more folks... genuinely interested.

 

[dave lackey]

i agree Dave. ownership is an idea for moving forward. feel free to toss out more folks... genuinely interested.

Boots on the ground! A professional should be out there always! Without it, we risk losing our basic rights.

How many professionals are out there? It is time for them/us to form our own organized news source. It can be done, it just takes leadership.🙂

 

[Colin Corneau]

"...the unit is well-positioned to have an even more positive impact on our networks and platforms."

Someone explain to me how less staff and fewer qualified professionals equals having an 'even more positive' effect on your final product?

Is that kind of like putting less gas in my car and being able to drive farther?

 

[dave lackey]

"...the unit is well-positioned to have an even more positive impact on our networks and platforms."

Someone explain to me how less staff and fewer qualified professionals equals having an 'even more positive' effect on your final product?

Is that kind of like putting less gas in my car and being able to drive farther?

It's called desk-jockeys. Give em a keyboard in the morning and out by air time. Their source? Twitter. Facebook. Ireporter. Whatever. The average person watching is being sucked in to all of this social media as if it were professional reportage and think it is high-tech truth when in the end it is all opinions and biases by whomever is being quoted.

How on earth are we to keep an eye on governments, crime, and all the other issues we face? 🙁 We are rapidly losing our rights to the truth.

 

[dave lackey]

"...the unit is well-positioned to have an even more positive impact on our networks and platforms."

Someone explain to me how less staff and fewer qualified professionals equals having an 'even more positive' effect on your final product?

Is that kind of like putting less gas in my car and being able to drive farther?

LOL...now they are comparing themselves to a UNIT...don't even start with that noun.😀😀😀

 

[dogbunny]

Funny, iReport content is their justification for why they shouldn't have to pay anyone and it was my justification for why I didn't need to visit that website anymore. I wonder who has their finger on the pulse of America? I might be the odd man out.

 

[emraphoto]

Boots on the ground! A professional should be out there always! Without it, we risk losing our basic rights.

How many professionals are out there? It is time for them/us to form our own organized news source. It can be done, it just takes leadership.🙂

i agree, it has been the topic of conversation amongst myself and a few of my colleagues for a while now. how to make it work, marketing etc.

some super talented folks are tossing it about. i think regional focus is what we will see. N49 out of Western Canada is a good example

 

[emraphoto]

"...the unit is well-positioned to have an even more positive impact on our networks and platforms."

Someone explain to me how less staff and fewer qualified professionals equals having an 'even more positive' effect on your final product?

Is that kind of like putting less gas in my car and being able to drive farther?

less people cloggin' up the server when the 'journalists' are loading wikipedia

 

[emraphoto]

Funny, iReport content is their justification for why they shouldn't have to pay anyone and it was my justification for why I didn't need to visit that website anymore. I wonder who has their finger on the pulse of America? I might be the odd man out.

bravo, i will not be swinging by CNN for news. at the rate they are going i can just fire up facebook.

 

[v_roma]

I'm in my early 30s and my entire professional life has been in the current "quaterly earnings above all" era. From what I hear/read, there was a (mythical) time when companies were guided by their desire to make a quality product and not by the stock market. I say this is a joking way but I often wonder what it would've been like.

That aside, is CNN to blame here? I recognize, like most people here, that they may just be shooting themselves in the foot. Everyone is making a crappy product for less so we're going to make our product crappy too kind of thing. But, to me, the question is, do they have a choice? Were they to choose to keep those photojournalists and improve the quality of their reporting, would the average consumer care/notice? Would they be able to survive and compete with other networks doing things on the cheap? I honestly don't know.

 

[dreilly]

What a fascinating, depressing thread. I'm a supporter of citizen journalism--at least to the extent that it can fill in the gaps/omissions of a professional media with clear biases and blind spots, but I also value enormously good reporting. I'm a citizen journalist myself, publishing a quarterly zine for the last few years about the city I live in. It fills a niche that has been utterly ignored, the need for good quality local coverage--of the feature variety. A quarterly can't do the police beat obviously. We do long-form interviews, I like to think of it as human interest storytelling done right. We still have a local daily...in my mind that might be one of the few remaining markets since TV won't cover the small places and neither will be the few standing big city papers. But it's not a bright future for sure.

 

[Paul Luscher]

First Olympus, no thanks to M.B.A. folly, and now this. There's a reason I have no respect for the Gospel of the Harvard School of Business.

 

[MikeL]

Eventually, an event will be reported with microsoft icons pasted into an image from google street view.