{"id":19804,"date":"2013-06-03T09:51:07","date_gmt":"2013-06-03T14:51:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techcitement.com\/?p=19804"},"modified":"2013-06-03T10:38:50","modified_gmt":"2013-06-03T15:38:50","slug":"chicago-sun-times-says-we-dont-need-no-stinkin-photographers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/hardware\/chicago-sun-times-says-we-dont-need-no-stinkin-photographers\/","title":{"rendered":"The Chicago Sun-Times Says It Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Photographers"},"content":{"rendered":"
The Chicago Tribune<\/em> reported<\/a> on Thursday that its local competition, the Chicago Sun-Times<\/em>, 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<\/em> reporters that they will receive \u201ciPhone photography basics\u201d classes as part of the restructuring to teach them how to produce their own photos and videos.<\/p>\n 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 <\/em>Magazines’s use of mobile devices and Instagram<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n