That’s photojournalists, not pajamas.
Leonard Witt at PJNet asks, “Do We Need Photojournalists?” then answers his own question with a resounding, “Yes!”
I agree.
Most snapshooters don’t know how to frame a photo, or …

Here is what he sent me in an email:

I read the post. I’m not much of a “joiner” of citizen journalism conversations. I’m all for CJ work when it comes to breaking news. They are; I’m not.

However, most CJs only want to cover sports and entertainment. These are predictable events that can be covered better by a pro. I don’t recall CJs at school board meetings, funerals or most of the other events I cover to inform the residents of this area.

While program-mode image quality has improved in recent years, the ability to compose and time story-telling images is what sets pros apart from amateurs. I looked through several pages of images. Almost all are evidentiary. The images say an event happened and people were there. They say nothing more. Honestly, I see more missed shots within those images than I see successes.

I also saw you’re excited about the recent layoffs at Capital Times.

Congratulations, greed-driven publishers like Capital Times and CJs should make good bedfellows.

Some quick thoughts:

The reason we need professional photojournalists(reporters, videographers, heck, plumbers, chefs, doctors) is pretty simple. Usually, when someone has been trained to do a job, loves it and does it eight hours a day, they tend to be better than an amatuer.

Amateur ’s stumble across great photos every once in a while, and when they do, most of the time, they don’t know how they did it. Pros know when they’ve got a good one and they make them more consistently.

I’ve looked at thousands of user contributed photos and they usually lack in these areas – framing, storytelling, and most importantly(especially when people are in the shot) decisive moment. Look up Henri Cartier Bresson on the last one.

The biggest difference why PJs are needed comes from passion. It’s not the best paying job out there and it requires a lot of thankless hours to get those moments people see in a good photo essay.

I know I’ve put in my time freezing my butt off in hip deep snow waiting for a 3-second shot of a dog sled race. But the photo was worth it. Most of the guys I know that are still working PJs do the job because they can’t imagine doing anything else.

Unfortunately news staffs and budgets are changing and these kind of people may not be around much longer. I hope web sites can hep stop this trend…but the Jack-of-all-trades mentality that Len talks about above worries me.

(Man, all this makes me want to be a PJ again.)