Journal Entry VI

The following is part of a series of reposted journal entries made for a reporting class I am taking right now. They aren't particularly edited, or necessarily even interesting (though hopefully they are), but they do a pretty good job of expressing what I am doing right now. And, of course, they are pre-made content. Reader beware.

Journal Entry 6: Photojournalism vs. Reporting

As I am taking both writing and photography courses, I have made a couple of observations. Both take a good amount of skill, time and observation. They both have ethical dilemmas that concern them, and remain to be solved. When a reporter enters the scene, they take a moment to write down their notes on the area, then proceed to speak with witnesses or contacts, etc. When a photographer enters a scene, they take general shots of the setting to situate themselves, then starts chatting with their subjects while they work their way into doing close-up portraits. Not too different.

Yet I have found that there is a real disconnect between reporters and photographers. Writers don’t seem to think much about the multimedia that will accompany their text, even though this is widely-acknowledged (in the vaguest of ways) as the future of the media. They seem comfortable in their chairs writing articles for text-filled newspapers that don’t really exist anymore.

Conversely, photographers feel their work is largely secondary to that of the reporters, despite studies that suggest images are far more significant. They feel in competition with the writers, and pen in long captions so that the writers can’t screw up their work. Of course, at the same time, neither group is doing particularly well right now outside of magazines. More students are going into television news, or getting out of news altogether, in lieu of entering the fracas that is the newspaper industry.

Photographers would do well to improve their writing skills, some of whose are abysmally low, so that they can do better to interface with the writers they contend with. But the writers need to exercise their visual acuity as well, or risk becoming side-lined in an ever-changing industry.