Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1998/11/25
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]At the risk of starting a flame war . . . Book publishers get bought by huge companies. So record companies. Small book stores get put out of business by large ones. And on and on it goes. And out of the void left behind rise new players to meet the needs abandoned by the previous generation if there is in fact really a need left over. Although the demise of the broadsheet seems deplorable to many of us given our age, let's not get too carried away by the thought that there is somehow a lack of news, information, insight, drivel, watchdogging, and all the other roles occasionally taken on by the local newspaper. Eric's employer and a double handful of others notwithstanding, there are precious few newspapers who can legitimately be accused of quality and thoughtful reporting of what's really newsworthy and significant. The fact that there are fewer and fewer two newspaper towns is a function of a hundred factors other than the doings of conglomerates or the gravity defying US equity markets. That one of the great traditional markets for PJ (and all the connections to Nikon Fs and M3s) is slowly getting choked off is surely a bad thing for the practitioners of the craft. It's probably not a great thing for readers as we all get less and less diversity in visual and literary point of view THROUGH THIS CHANNEL. But again, out of those ashes new opportunity for visually recording and interpreting our world will arise as surely as spring follows winter. The answer? Francesco's mini lug site! :) My two cents. Kevin Hoffberg >These new owners, with far-flung and diverse economic interest, have >little commitment to local communities. It is possible that they are not >likely to be committed to journalistic (watchdog) traditions. >The news shouldn't be defined primarily as one of the profit making products >in a conglomerate's portfolio. While this is true, and the trend for newspapers is to chains (Thanks FCC for selling out) and for Wall Street portfolios to look at papers as profit centers rather than the fourth estate, the journalists who work in them are often at opposition to this trend, and do whatever they can to be subversive to the diluting of content. Not always successful. The small papers are most vulnerable to the bean counter syndrome. I, on the other hand, am quite lucky to be at a locally owned paper that cares about quality and as long as it earns the owners a good profit (somewhere in the 30 percent range right now, though for the next year it's a negative because we're dropping $7.5 million for new presses) we won't be sold to the chains. But what does this have to do with Leica? Photojournalism as a profession is quite cost conscious, and that has a lot more to do with choice of cameras used rather than performance of those cameras. So the fact that they are, or aren't used by photojournalists has more to do with that. Many of the ones I know would choose Leica if they could afford it. They are subversives like me. :-) - -- Eric Welch St. Joseph, MO http://www.ponyexpress.net/~ewelch "I say, play your own way. Don't play what the public wants. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you're doing - even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years." - -- Thelonious Monk