(and truth!)

and television media and their corresponding websites are to blame for this... mostly. As they use more "citizen" journalists photos and videos, it makes the general public used to seeing subpar photography, whether video or film/digital. Photojournalism is one of my favorite types of photography and it's sad that corporations are killing it off.

The idiot that came up with getting rid of the photo professionals, and whoever approved it, should be shown the door.

Has a much broader spectrum of possibilities than most people think it has.

This past weekend I was shooting a parade but using a hybrid of mobile and conventional photography, you can stick an eye-fi card in most cameras, set the camera to shoot Raw/Jpg and let your jpgs stream to your phone. You don't have to give up quality for convenience, I was shooting them then used the phone to edit the shots, live blog and also post to Instagram where they pooling everyone's shots from the event and I still have the Raw to play with later.

Professionals know how to frame a shot, use colour, lighting, etc to get the emotional impact that is needed.

But the days of Weegee are long gone but then again newspapers have changed dramatically since William Randolph Hearst, newspapers today are running on multiple platforms, print, web and various forms of social media and mobile technology is a natural interface with all those platforms. It doesn't come as any big surprise that this has happened since every local newspaper in the country has been cutting back on staff photographers for quite a while. My local doesn't always send out a photographer to cover an event, hell they don't always send out a reporter, they clip it from the press release and wait for us to email our own photo which has been shot by a professional.

Is there still a place for professional photojournalists, you bet, Magnum is full of them, but it's an evolving place.

And you thought it was hard making a living as a photographer before.

Someone's head should roll for this kind of thing. Photography is such a powerful tool for getting news stories across to the general public, especially stories of social import. I don't care how well written the article is, something that is also extremely important, nothing will deliver the message quite like a stunning, moving photo: