Well, that's just great. So now what?

Since I wrote The Future Of Photojournalism last week my mailbox has been filled with reaction. Some of it came from outside the United States. It seems things are equally bad for photojournalists in South America and Europe, with the added factor that most countries don't have quality photojournalism programs like the ones stateside at the University of Missouri at Columbia, or Ohio University at Athens, or Western Kentucky University. So their young photographers often have even less training, even less professional mentoring, and even less business experience than their American counterparts.

So things may be even worse than I imagined. I was sincerely hoping that many of our problems were the unique byproduct of a greedy American corporate media culture combined with the proliferation of Type "A" personalities, whipped into a consumerism and lifestyle frenzy by the North American marketing machine that has helped to make "24 Hour News" and the Sunday morning television cult of journalism personalities keystones of our current society. But if things are this way, or worse, for photojournalists outside the United States, then these symptoms truly point to a disease that is in the advanced stage of its progression.

Almost all of the mail reacting to the first journal can be put into the "I agree with you, but you also left out . . ." category, where the author goes on to illustrate yet another factor or another problem with the future of our profession. I'm very grateful for all the messages. The quantity and spirit of them tell me that there are more people out there who care very deeply about photojournalism than I might have imagined. Some of this feedback is here in the "talkBack" forum of this Web site. Other messages came directly to me, and I've kept them and re-read them many times. One simple message that struck me was a note that basically said "Okay, so those are the problems. Got any solutions?"

No, I don't think that I have any solutions, no more so than anyone else who sits awake late into the night wondering what's going to happen to this profession. Chatting online late one night this week with fellow photojournalist Susan Markisz, we both agreed that photojournalism as it is practiced today, for the low income that it returns and for the limited opportunity for financial success and professional advancement that is offers, is not so much a profession as it is an obsession. Those who continue under current conditions are certainly not in the business for the money, or for the security, or for the working environment or the hours. To say that it is a merely labor of love is an apt description.

No, I still don't think that I have solutions. But I do have some ideas, which I'm sure many people will think are indeed wild. Maybe some of you have already come to these same conclusions. The problems I wrote about in the previous journal dealt with the journalism schools, their relationships to the media business, the business practices and corporate policies of newspapers and magazines and wire services that are working to take income and intellectual property rights away from photographers, and in the process destroy the ability to make a long-term, sustainable income from the profession, and the problem of photographers themselves doing some of the most severe damage to the industry by undercutting other working photojournalists.

But the first thing that has to change are the journalism schools with photojournalism programs. The deans and faculties must themselves police the profession. They must stop flooding the empty job market with class after class of expectant graduates. They must base admission on market conditions: when there are fewer jobs, admit fewer students. A relatively simple concept, yet one that is not practiced.

Next, change the way the schools are funded so that reduced class loads and smaller graduating classes don't diminish future funding. Eliminate enrollment and graduation quotas that determine the future budgets within the university's overall budget. Stop operating journalism schools within universities as if they are profit and loss centers of revenue, and go back to the old-fashioned generic one-college, one-budget system, where during some years profitable schools will support the losses of other departments based on the natural ebb and flow of the market, the economy, and the increase and decrease in the populations within the professions themselves.

Then apply some fairly high labor and compensation standards to the internships that the students are sent to fill, and please have the spine to hold the employer's feet to the fire if they fail to meet the school's conditions. Interns are not slaves, and they're not motivational live bait to be dangled under the noses of tenured staff photographers come time for the annual review. Professors, please stop planting in your student's minds the notion that if they work harder, longer, cheaper, and in less-than-professional conditions, that they will ultimately get ahead. They will not get ahead. They will merely come to be expected to work under those same conditions for that same pay, and by doing so they will continue to contribute to the demise of the profession.

Journalism schools, please do not encourage or allow students to intern for large, extremely profitable newspaper chains for no pay in order to do it just "for the experience". If this practice continues, soon there will no longer be any paying jobs for your graduates. And then there won't be any new incoming classes of photojournalism students because there won't be any jobs with sustainable compensation for them to search for after graduation. And then you'll all be out of teaching jobs anyway. If a corporation or newspaper does not maintain the employment standards that educators establish for internships, then do not send them any more interns next year. Period. They might actually have to hire a staff photographer to do the work instead. One of your graduates could actually be earning a salary.

Finally, apply increased standards to the graduating classes so that their degrees actually mean something more than the level of debt they've incurred for four years. Make the degree stand for a certified minimum level of measurable and testable skills (like the ability to read a photographic assignment and to then write a grammatically correct photo caption without spelling and factual errors). One message I received this week was from the editor of a weekly newspaper who sees many recent photojournalism college graduates who are searching for their first job. She reports that they "cannot handle the basic task of a daily newspaper assignment". Please, explain to me how can this be the case when the photographer has just graduated from a photojournalism school with a four-year college degree ? Where are the standards for weeding out these people long before they even graduate?

Educators: Make your own school's degree actually amount to something, rather than continuing to devalue it by creating scores of unemployable photojournalists who often lack these basic skills. Create an extremely high level of standards for both admission and for graduation, and then have the fortitude to stick to the standards. Then, and only then, will a four year degree in photojournalism really be something of value on the job market.

Once out of college and into the real working world things are even worse for photojournalists, if you can imagine. If this profession is to survive, the attitudes of newspaper and magazine and wire service management towards photographers, and the business and craft of photography itself, must change. Aside from stopping the practice of slave-labor internships, and below-minimum-wage freelance rates, the appreciation, compensation, and attitude toward experience and expertise has to evolve so that the photojournalist with more than ten years of experience can afford to stay in the business instead of being forced by economic conditions into taking almost any other job that pays more than $25,000.00 per year.

Managers who think that experienced photojournalists should forego the financial rewards that the rest of American society seems to think that they are entitled to simply by virtue of age and experience must stop expecting people to work for free, or nearly free, for most of their adult lives. Statistics show that an American's prime earning potential is during the ten years between the ages of 40 and 50. During that decade, the majority of Americans peak out at the top of their earning levels. I'm 44 years old, with 23 years in photojournalism, and if that's true then I'm really pissed. I seriously doubt that reporters and editors and sales and marketing department employees would continue in the publishing profession much past ten years if they knew in advance that their income potential was never going to exceed what they're earning after five years in the business. So why should photojournalists be any different?

Sadly, one of the most dangerous elements hurting the profession today are some of the photographers themselves. Photographers who continue to work for sub-minimum wages, photographers who continue to supply local newspapers with spot news and freelance photographs for $15.00 and $25.00 and $35.00, especially those whose majority source of income is not from professional photography nor will it ever be, and photographers who sign "work for hire" contracts and pick up freelance jobs for less-than acceptable day rates when other photographers have already refused the offer based on principal and professional standards, are stabbing the profession in the very heart. These people are furthering the idea that photojournalism is not something of unique value, and this is a business practice that is draining the economic life out of the profession. Simply put, on the part of all parties involved, it is immoral.

If someone is offering $35.00 for an assignment, please do the profession of photojournalism and yourself a great favor and respectfully tell them to shove it up their ass. Thirty five dollars is not going to make or break your mortgage payment, nor will it land you a clip that magically leads to a staff-for-life job at The New York Times. Taking a "work for hire" assignment that another photojournalist has turned down on principal is not doing anyone, yourself included, any favor. All you are doing is recording, on the spreadsheets of media history, the already-established notion that photojournalists will undercut and undersell each other until the price hits the absolute bottom and until all the rights that you have to give away have been systematically plucked from you like a naive pick-pocketing victim.

Every time someone takes one of these abysmal assignments, it's just another brick knocked out of the crumbling foundation of professional photojournalism. If you need $35.00 that badly, please go work a few shifts at McDonalds or take a weekend job at a one-hour photo lab. Please do anything else except to continue to dilute the photography marketplace. Your instant gratification and ego compensation via an 8-point Helvetica byline is far more cancerous to the profession than it is rewarding to your anemic career.

Keep your photographs to yourself rather than give them away. Use the money earned in a real job to work on building a portfolio that might open the door to a full-time, honest-to-God paying job as a working photojournalist, in a profession that may someday regain strength if it hasn't already been diluted to death, when there might someday be a sustainable living wage.

As long as newspapers and magazines and wire services can successfully draw upon a labor pool of underpaid freelancers, those who have already proven that they are willing to undercut each other even when it does them more harm than good, then the media giants will continue to do so. Photographers will have played right into their hands, and will have personally contributed to both the increase in the big business profit margins and the simultaneous decrease of their own profession.

But if the media giants are unable to take photojournalism down this one-way road to nowhere because people actually refuse to work under these conditions, then guess what will happen? They will not go out of business because of it. They will not stop staffing the news and sporting events of the world; the news is a hungry machine that is never satisfied. They will have no choice, they will have to actually pay a higher wage for the work. They will actually have to change the way they do business. They will actually have to cut into the profits and to pay photographers more than $35.00 for a days work. They may actually have to hire full-time staff photographers. Imagine that.

But every time a photographer signs away intellectual property rights and hands over all future claims to the images by reimbursing the pay check, the media moguls have gained another valuable foothold in the battle. The concept of "work for hire" must change with regards to photojournalism if the profession is to even survive. The concept of "rights in perpetuity" and "in all contexts and all media" must change if photographers expect to be able to earn a living for a lifetime and then be able to afford to retire. The concept of copyright and who holds this right must change, so that it is always the photographer who holds the rights, and that his employer is the one who is licensing back from the photographer the limited right to use his images as long as the photographer is under a defined agreement and specified terms of employment. And when a photographer leaves that agreement, the rights to his images leave with him unless otherwise licensed back to the employer for additional future use.

These are the only ways people are going to be able to earn a living as photojournalists in the very near future. After a lifetime in photojournalism, a person should be left with more than a box full of old images. There should be some money in the bank, there should be some professional standing within the community, there should be some opportunity to earn additional income from the sale of images that were created over a life-long career. And there should be some peace of mind in the knowledge that a career and a profession wasn't sabotaged by ones peers and by hobbyists and non-professional opportunists who were willing to undermine a livelihood for whatever reasons, be they financial or egotistical or out of sheer ignorance.

Behind the Viewfinder - A Year in the Life of Photojournalism
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