MMMM # 399 -- The death of the photo profession

    

      From a TIME magazine interview with veteran news photographer Tim Page:

"To make a living as a photographer these days is impossible. I was there the other day, and there were 100 people with cameras, video cameras and iPhones. And where are you going to sell the pictures? There’s no money involved in the business anymore. Even if you’re a known entity, getting a job is no easy thing."

     Not surprisingly, the picture part of the news business has been treated the same as the word part by the digital revolution.
     The Chicago Tribune fired all of it's photographers in July, saying basically that the reporters can take the pictures too. Right. Just like the photographers can write the stories.

     Another part of the media business in which it is apparently impossible to make money is national news magazines. What's left of Newsweek (which stopped publishing a print edition last year) was sold  for an undisclosed sum to an all digital news operation called IBT earlier this month.

     I receive TIME at home, and frankly, the printed magazine just works better next to the throne.

[ALSO: I believe it was the Chamber of Commerce, or Envision 2020, that invented the term "River Region" to describe the five-county area centered on the city of Montgomery. So I was surprised to see this headline in the Sunday Advertiser:

Arts events coming up in River Region

     The first item was The Sidewalk Film Festival. In Birmingham, Which, unless I've
misunderstood the meaning the the term, is a ways off from the River Region.]

[The Monday Morning Media Memo is a regular feature of TimLennox.com]