The Chicago Sun-Times Says It Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Photographers

The Chicago Tribune reported on Thursday that its local competition, the Chicago Sun-Times, laid off its entire photography staff and plans to use a combination of reporters and freelance photographers to capture photos of the news instead. In a memo to staffers, managing editor Craig Newman informed Sun-Times reporters that they will receive “iPhone photography basics” classes as part of the restructuring to teach them how to produce their own photos and videos.

This is another attempt at cutting costs with newspaper journalism struggling to remain profitable. But will it work? Certainly, a newspaper has the ability to purchase high-quality photography from wire services, but that leaves it with the same photos everyone else has. Reporters are sometimes capable of using iPhones to produce quality photos, as evidenced by Time Magazines’s use of mobile devices and Instagram to document the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in New York. Nonetheless, if one believes in the idea that “a picture is worth a thousand words,” it’s difficult to understand how a major newspaper can so willingly discard the entire team of professionals who specialize in collecting those pictures. (One of the 28 photographers laid off is John H. White, who won a Pulitzer Prize for feature photography in 1982.) I can’t imagine a reporter can do his or her best work as a writer while trying to find time to clean up marginal quality photos taken with an iPhone in Photoshop.

Nikon expert Thom Hogan commented, “If you’re in the content business, there’s one simple rule you have to remember: create the best content for your chosen media. First, you can sell great content to customers (circulation revenue). Second, you can sell your access to a great set of customers to others (advertising revenue). Corollary: if you don’t invest in the content, you’ll die.”

Perhaps it’s a sign of the times that the public is content with amateur quality news, as long as it’s as cheap as possible to obtain it. However, I’d say a newspaper eliminating all of its staff photographers could also be a sign of the Sun-Times heading off into the sunset.