It's not the beginning of the end of photojournalism, it's past the end of photography in general. Nobody actually cares about photography other than photographers. We've gone beyond post modern to post photography. Images are only eye candy to the majority of the population.
With photography being available to almost anyone - as author as well as a consumer, it has become both a medium of utter triviality as well as of documentation and of art.
Triviality: Don't misunderstand this as condescending, we all record our private memories , our families or our vacations mostly with the purpose of simply conserving moments or remembrance, most often without any claim of artistry. There's nothing wrong with that, since these pictures are quite private and have no meaning for anybody except for ourselves.
Documentation: This is what we remember from the heydays of photojournalism. I grew up on copies of Life Magazine, Der Stern (Germany) or Ogonjok (Russia), and I admired the photographers' capability to condense a story into iconic pictures, which I accepted as plain truth. Unfortunately, that sometimes wasn't true even back in those times. Today - with the availability of computer-based image editing, photography has lost most of its innocence. But so has video ... Without some form of basic imaging ethics, photography has always been, is and will always be a particularly attractive , seductive form of deception.
Art: Even more so than wet lab magic, computer-based image editing has moved photography much closer to drawing or painting, essentially making photography one of many tools that can help to produce pictures. Oddly, I feel this may be the most sincere form of photography because it doesn't pretend to be anything else than purely subjective, simply showing the artist's inner vision.
