Phil Coomes' blog on the BBC website has a really good Q&A with industry people about "Photojournalism Today", prompted in part by the trouble at Gamma.
It's hard to unknit the regular, perennial discussions about the way things have gone downhill since the "golden age" of photojournalism from the real concerns about the way traditional business models have been challenged by the digital media age. The bottom line is that in an age of unrestricted digital diffusion the image has become more used and less valued. The potential audience for an image I shoot for a magazine today is bigger than ever, thanks to the internet (and the single figure "web fee" attached on to my invoice). The problem is that most of those people are seeing my images for free (and that's why the "web fee" is in single figures).
There's lots of nonsense theorizing about how business models might evolve in this climate, this review of the recent book “Free: The Future of a Radical Price" by Chris Anderson, effectively counters a lot of the more alarming ideas about the value of "content" that used to be called word and pictures. Even so, as a creative professional it's hard to feel comfortable with phrases like "information wants to be free" fighting to become part of the new business lexicon and the vague idea that by charging someone to use your photography you are foolishly clinging to ideas of information ownership that are so outdated as to be laughable.
