The brain trust at the Sun-Times laid off its entire photography staff on Thursday

[phantom power]

At the Sun-Times, "Story" is out.

"Content" is King,

Athenae at First Draft has the story:

Shutterbugs shut out at Sun-Times

The guy whose office is next to mine is the head of our visual sequence, a former news photographer and a pretty laid-back guy. During one particularly tumultuous term, however, he ended up in my office with the door closed, looking like he wanted to stab someone to death.

He had just come from a meeting with our chair, in which he attempted to convince the man that visuals needed a bigger place in our curriculum. The conversation turned from patronizing to dismissive, with the denouement being delivered when the chair whipped out his cell phone and said something to the effect of, “Look, I can take pictures with my phone. It’s not a big deal.”

We both thought it was a ridiculous statement. Apparently, the Chicago Sun-Times heard it and thought it was inspired.

The brain trust at the Sun-Times laid off its entire photography staff on Thursday. The paper issued a statement that was clearly written by someone who got his PR degree out of a Cracker Jack box. The Sun-Times blamed the audience that is “seeking more video content” and noted that “business is changing rapidly.” By the time I got to their need to “evolve with our digitally savvy customers,” I stopped reading because I had officially won my game of “buzzword bullshit bingo.”

The paper, of course, is not giving up on visuals, nor is it going back to the days of paying artists to do etchings. Instead, they’ll let reporters with phone cameras do most of the easy work and they’ll hire freelancers to pick up the slack. Where might these professional freelancers come from? Oh, wait… The Sun-Times just created 28 of them by FIRING THE WHOLE PHOTO STAFF.
...

Having heard this same gabba-gabba dressed up in a hundred different suits since the 1980s, it still surprised me that anyone is still surprised to discover (A) when management becomes enamored of the theory that everyone except people like them are fungible meat bags (funbags!) that (B) everything quickly turns to a puddle of cold sick, which is (C) usually when the same management that converted a once-viable enterprise into a puddle of cold sick decides to spend an enormous pile of cash to hire a clown-car of consultants just like them to tell them that even more underlings will need to be "rightsized" onto the scrap heap.

And they called it the birth of the blues.
http://driftglass.blogspot.com/2013/05/every-picture-tells-story.html

[frazzled]

1. It's a move to get rid of full-time union folk and hire part-timers

Sun-Times Media released a statement Thursday to The Associated Press confirming the move: “Today, The Chicago Sun-Times has had to make the very difficult decision to eliminate the position of full-time photographer, as part of a multimedia staffing restructure.” The statement noted that the “business is changing rapidly” and audiences are “seeking more video content with their news.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/01/business/media/chicago-sun-times-lays-off-all-its-full-time-photographers.html?_r=0

No way -- even with increasing digital readers -- that video will come to replace still images. I just want to see the images and not spend the time to watch a video.

[badtoworse]

2. I have to agree

A picture is worth a thousand words and communicates them in seconds. I don't have the patience and frequently don't have the time to watch a video.

[petronius]

6. True, but it's much more difficult to embed an advertisement before a reader sees

a picture, like they can before a video. I'd guess that the 'desire' for more video content is driven more by the ad department and less by reader feedback. (Personally, I avoid the video content wherever possible - I'd rather read and look at pictures at my own pace...)

[librechik]

9. exactly.

we will die when unions die. Why does management struggle so hard to kill us?

They would actually make more money if they treated us like human beings (Costco)

[BrotherIvan]

3. Just like in the film industry

They'll be giving the honor to an intern or a 20 year-old who gets paid less than $100 to work a standard 10 hour day.

[nadinbrzezinski]

4. They will rely on reader submitted, for free, material

Problem is some places that reader can't go to

[Posteritatis]

7. For the rest they'll contract out film crews at only double the price, no doubt. (nt)

[nadinbrzezinski]

8. One of our local freelance videographers

Gets 85/story.

When hubby used to do the photography freelance in San Fran he got 140/story...that was 25 years ago.

Hell, we know we get paid by piece, but that has gone significantly down. So no, freelancers will lose out

[PDittie]

5. They could have fired the

four corporate executives who came up with this idea and perhaps saved even more. Which demonstrates once more how incompetent newspaper managers are. They took a business where they earned 30% profit margins for decades and screwed the pooch.