CJR reporting:

TEN MONTHS AGO, the Chicago Tribune simultaneously launched two accounts on Instagram, the photo-sharing social media platform: one showcasing the work of the paper’s staff photographers and another highlighting old photos from the basement archives.
In less than a year, the staff photography account has attracted a respectable 4,496 followers. But it is the vintage account—the brainchild of Robin Daughtridge, the paper’s director of photography—that has been the surprise hit, with nearly 25,000 followers.Daughtridge and photo editor Marianne Mather post up to eight photos a day, little black-and-white flashbacks from the massive archives of the Tribune Tower. Recent photos show morning commuters on an express bus in 1981, two women at North Avenue Beach in 1960, and a late-career Babe Ruth in his Boston Braves uniform, sitting in the Wrigley Field dugout in 1935...http://www.cjr.org/united_states_project/instagram_chicago_illinois_news.php

Visual jobs in newsrooms have fallen by nearly half since 2000

Poynter reporting:
Staff jobs for photographers, artists and videographers reported in the American Society of News Editors’ annual census have dropped 43 percent since 2000, Monica Anderson writes.

By comparison, the number of full-time newspaper reporters and writers dropped by 32%—from 25,593 to 17,422. In the same period, 27% of copy and layout editor and online producer jobs were lost, falling from 10,901 to 7,980.

In the last three years, Anderson notes, jobs in those categories have fallen 18 percent, much faster than copy editors or reporters.

http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/229302/visual-jobs-in-newsrooms-have-fallen-by-nearly-half-since-2000/

Are Are Photojournalists A Digital Casualty?

NetNewsCheck reporting:
On May 30, the Sun-Times laid off its entire photography staff of 28, including Pulitzer Prize winner John White, in a move management deemed essential to clear the way for more online video. The story sent shock waves through just about every newsroom in North America and far beyond media circles.
News staffs so expert at asking tough questions for a living now had a new, anxious one to ponder: Is the photojournalism we know as much a relic as the musty old darkroom?
"I think photojournalism is coming to a dead end, at least in the way it was practiced in the late 1970s and mid-’80s,” says Mark Hinojosa, director of interactive media at the Detroit News. As a veteran journalist who rose through the ranks as a photographer, Hinojosa says this realization saddens him. And he’s hanging on in Detroit, at least for now.
“We still have a full photo staff,” he says, “but I could easily see a day when the staff is much smaller and it’s used for big events, and the day-to-day stuff will be handled by reporters. It will be OK, but something will be lost. Why? Because a writer doesn't see the visual potential in a story, and can't always find something that's transformative.”
Look beyond the Midwest — where reports of impending layoffs currently dog photographers and reporters at the Chicago Tribune — and you’ll see much evidence that photojournalism has entered its twilight hours...
http://www.netnewscheck.com/article/30055/are-photojournalists-a-digital-casualty

Seventeen Magazine Vows to Show Girls ‘as They Really Are’

Media Decoder reporting:
Seventeen magazine, which in recent months has been inundated by pleas from teenage girls to publish photographs of models that don’t look touched up, said on Tuesday that it would be more transparent about its photo shoots and promised to “celebrate every kind of beauty.”
Ann Shoket, the magazine’s editor in chief, wrote in the editor’s letter in the August issue that the magazine had drafted what it called a Body Peace Treaty, after she heard from girls “who were concerned that we’d strayed from our promise to show real girls as they really are.”

Craig Dilger for The New York TimesJulia Bluhm, who organized a petition over digitally altered images of models in magazines.

She said the entire staff signed the eight-point pact, in which the magazine promises that it will “never change girls’ body or face shapes” and will include only images of “real girls and models who are healthy.”
It also said it would provide more transparency about its photo shoots by posting images of the shoots on the magazine’s Tumblr blog so readers could see the progression of the pictures.
http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/03/after-petition-drive-seventeen-magazine-commits-to-show-girls-as-they-really-are/

The meaning of 9/11's most controversial photo

Guardian reporting:
In the photograph Thomas Hoepker took on 11 September 2001, a group of New Yorkers sit chatting in the sun in a park in Brooklyn. Behind them, across brilliant blue water, in an azure sky, a terrible cloud of smoke and dust rises above lower Manhattan from the place where two towers were struck by hijacked airliners this same morning and have collapsed, killing, by fire, smoke, falling or jumping or crushing and tearing and fragmentation in the buildings' final fall, nearly 3,000 people.
Ten years on, this is becoming one of the iconic photographs of 9/11, yet its history is strange and tortuous. Hoepker, a senior figure in the renowned Magnum photographers' co-operative, chose not to publish it in 2001 and to exclude it from a book of Magnum pictures of that horribly unequalled day. Only in 2006, on the fifth anniversary of the attacks, did it appear in a book, and then it caused instant controversy. The critic and columnist Frank Rich wrote about it in the New York Times. He saw in this undeniably troubling picture an allegory of America's failure to learn any deep lessons from that tragic day, to change or reform as a nation: "The young people in Mr Hoepker's photo aren't necessarily callous. They're just American."
In other words, a country that believes in moving on they have already moved on, enjoying the sun in spite of the scene of mass carnage that scars the fine day. Indeed, I can't help thinking the five apparently unmoved New Yorkers resemble the characters in the famous 1990s television comedy Seinfeld, who in the show's final episode are convicted under a Good Samaritan law of failing to care about others.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/02/911-photo-thomas-hoepker-meaning