Reportage 2006 style

Hanging around YouTube or Flickr is teeth-grinding agony for professional guardians of quality, because it's all daft teenagers waving at their mates and pouting at webcams, right?

Before you write off Web 2.0 media as Dirty Sanchez Jnr. without the wit, humour or entertainment, have a look at this embedded documentally.com podcast 'Those who face death'.

 

It's a serious, competent and interesting piece of Citizen-ish Journalism, by a chap by the name of Christian from Northampton. He describes it as "My first video podcast which is really a selection of photographs strung together to words and music. Last year I took a trip with a friend, to Kurdistan. ... "

The theory that documentary photography is long dead and surplus to the requirements of market-driven media, may well be true. However, it is clearly determined not to lay down and die. Christian's Documentally site is hosted at Blogger.com for free, the podcast served by YouTube for free. In all probability it will be seen by many tens of thousands around the world as a result of blogging and sharing. All for free, of course.

Compare and contrast with the Old Media approach of scrabbling for guarantees and publication and/or gallery space and a foothold in the precarious economics of photo-book publishing. Who has lost the plot, here, professionals or CJ's?

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Comments

Flickr etc

Submitted by Gascoyne (not verified) on Sat, 2006-11-04 19:08.

"Hanging around YouTube or Flickr is teeth-grinding agony for professional guardians of quality, because it's all daft teenagers waving at their mates and pouting at webcams, right?"

That's what I would have assumed. I found out what (roughly) Flickr is a few weeks ago, and YouTube the other day after the newspaper reported that some yob had been apprehended after being so dim as to post his criminal exploits on it.

You're a busy, interesting man. Most of us are extremely busy who are self employed. Outside work there are lots of things to do - creative, stimulating, constructive... There aren't enough hours in the day. How can you spare even seconds to look at this obscure web stuff? How much value does it add to your fast-diminishing life? Not being snotty - just curious.

Obscure?

Submitted by Tony Sleep on Sat, 2006-11-04 23:43.

We edit images on computers, we publish them on computers, much of our interaction with clients and others is, like this, via  computer.  So your question seems rather like asking 'why look out the windscreen of the car you're driving, when there are so many more interesting things to do?'. I want to see where the road leads and try and maybe stay ahead of the curve rather than get flattened by evolution.

I didn't, though, go trawling YouTube or Flickr looking for this stuff. I only ever go to either when someone or something has pointed me at them.

Citizen Journalism (and more precisely, the tendency of media corporations to blag material which they then use commercially) is a big issue in photography. Yesterday, as the result of wanting to answer a posting on a mailing list I ended up via Google and Cyberjournalist.net at the Progressive Podcast Network, which features Documentally's podcast on the front page. To be honest, I found it creative, stimulating and constructive :-)

Regards, Tony Sleep

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