ABSTRACT
Professional journalism in the twenty-first century has been marked by unprecedented disruptions in the form of institutional, technological, and social change. By and large, the industry response to such change has been to decimate staffing levels in the service of economic rationalism. Around the world, it has been the photography departments at news organizations that have been particularly savaged. In the US, the job market for “visual journalists” was more than halved between 1999 and 2015. Ambivalence towards the photograph itself has impacted on how press photographers have been treated throughout the history of the news media. In 2018, the Media, Entertainment, and Arts Alliance put the total number of Australian journalist/photographer job losses at more than 3,000 over the last ten years. The Australian news media market has undergone a dramatic shrinking of staff/salaried positions of news workers over the last decade, and photographic departments at all of the major news organizations have been decimated.
