Sinking

...ship that is.

In my career I started out as a photojournalist working for nearly every paper in Utah in one form or another.

Started out in Tooele shooting half-tones at 5am for paste-up with a waxer and x-acto knife at 8. What memories. I've seen the digital revolution rumored and whispered about, then fully embraced. Darkrooms and stat cameras tossed out the windows. Hard-drives and sat. phones eaten up like candy. Big big changes in the industry during my career.

I've shot for AP, UPI, AFP, Newsweek, Forbes, Agence France-Presse, some unknown Asian business magazines, Runners World, and a smattering of magazines in the off-roading industry. A pretty varied career within publishing, and the industry has always captured my interest, even after I abandoned it 15 years ago.

Why did I jump ship? I didn't like the way things were going. Let's just say I was a round hole trying to fit into a square peg. I left and started shooting commercially and editorially, but no more hard news.

I held my breath, silently at times, at others not so silent, as I watched the news business turn more into business and less into news. Clearly it's been bad business, because things in the newsaper bid'ness just ain't what they used to be.

I don't think of myself as any kind of soothsayer, but as I saw newspapers shift and squirm and try to figure out how they were going to deal with cable TV and the internet, I wondered how they were going to survive.

Multi-media arrived with a subdued roar to the newspaper bid'ness, and the lines of print/TV were blurred even more. Being a 'Platypus' was beginning to be considered a necessary evil. What's a platypus? A newspaper PJ who was forced to carry a video camera and generate content for the internet. How in the world they expected even that small change to work is beyond me. For some it does work, for most it doesn't.

It's been sort of sad, but almost predictable to see the slow steady demise of the newspaper industry. Where it will go from here is anyone's guess...but not really.

Newspapers are slow and cumbersome, and some would even say cold-blooded. Kind of reminds me of another creature that went extinct en-masse.

This recent screen-grab from Drudge says it all:



These headlines have been trickling in for some time now. Unfortunately I think the flood gates might be opening.