PathSource - PHOTOJOURNALIST, IN-DEPTH: Demand For Work Still High But Job Has Changed Considerably

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PHOTOJOURNALIST, IN-DEPTH: Demand For Work Still High But Job Has Changed Considerably

About this video

Chris, a Photojournalist, describes what he likes about his job, its challenges, and how hard it is to find work in his field. With the advent of digital, the field is completely different. It used to be you'd take one photo per story, now you take 20, and must quickly move on to the next assignment. Still, the industry will always need intelligent and hard-working people with a great sense of light and composition.

Degree: Journalism

Job Title: Photojournalist

Job Summary: Digital Journalist

Job Description

Digital journalist is a new breed of reporter who focuses on creating interactive news stories and blogs with videos, photos and animations.

On-the-Job Training

Moderate-term on-the-job training

Quick Facts

Average salary

National Statistic Change Location

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$30,000 - $150,000

Projected Job Growth

1 to 8 percent

Typical schedule

Full-time, Irregular, Flexible, Long hours

Typical workplace

Home, Indoor, Office, Travel, Outdoor

Personal Qualities

Analytical skills, Artistic, Creativity, Verbal communication skills, Written communication skills, Networking, People skills, Public speaking ability

Educational Path

Education Requirement

Bachelor's degree

Recommended Education Degree

Bachelor's degree

Recommended Majors

Journalism
English Language and Literature
Film and Photography
Liberal Arts
History

Related Careers

Editor
Photographer
Videographer
Public Relations

View Detailed Career Data

PathSource provides free English transcriptions for each of our informational interviews on video which will appear here after you have signed in. Our advanced transcriptions are highly interactive. They scroll down automatically as the video plays and users can jump to a specific part of the video by clicking on any word in the transcript.

For a small fee, we offer transcriptions in different languages, making PathSource a great tool for English Language Learners. This feature is currently available for customers in the education field only.

Please contact us at support@pathsoruce.com if you have any questions or would like to get a price quote for advanced transcripts offered in a second language.

P3.instances[0].transcript.parse_transcript_data({"transcript":"So you make a lot of engagements and relationships with people, whether it's, I guess either the mayor, or the community. Or the family that you just happen to see at the park on a regular basis. So that's one of the things that I really enjoy about it. What's challenging is taking something you see continuously, and presenting it in a new way, getting it out there so that you're viewing audience, whoever they might be, will be able to see it, recognize it, get something out of it. And they don't feel like they're looking at the same old thing over and over. Press conferences are a big deal. You photograph a lot of them, and it takes a lot to go into a press conference in a building, in a room where you photograph frequently the same people over and over, and come up with something interesting and different. So, tenacity is really, really important. Getting into photojournalism right now is a little more difficult than it used to be. Newspapers, as newspapers in and of themselves exist, are going away. They're slowly vanishing. Big cities like Chicago, Detroit, New York, so forth, their papers are fading away, and most of them are in bankruptcy right now. And it's been very, very difficult. The onslaught of digital media in the past 20 years is just really taking a toll on what we do with journalists. So while the newspaper is going away, and a lot of people in the industry are just going, oh, it's all community journalism, and people with iPhones, it's like, well, the low end, crappy stuff is going to be that. But that doesn't [INAUDIBLE] there isn't still a need for intelligent to be out there who have a sense of light and composition, and the intellectual means to put those two to use, and make interesting photographs. The way that it would have been in the past, obviously, to portray that would be to get it into a newspaper. But now the venues are dramatically different, you know? It's largely online, a lot of it needs to have enough impact, so that it can be interpreted over someone's smartphone. And also, there are different ways we can do it. It used to typically be a single photograph per assignment. Now what's called a photo story has become far more common. There are programs like Slideshow that will help you put up 15 or 20 stories, along with an interview. I'm sorry, 15 or 20 still photos, along with an interview to help explain something. And then on top of that, if you want, there's live action video. And photographers are being asked to do all of those things in most of their assignments now. So the demand for work is a lot higher from the photographer, but you were never sent into the darkroom to work the last three hours of your shift. It's a lot easier. They spread the workload in different ways. So you spend more time in the field, which is nice, but also, you go through that difficulty of changing gears from one assignment to the next. And that can be challenging. And going from a project where you just photograph somebody who had a loved one die of cancer, and talk with them for a half hour or hour, photographing them, and going from that to something where it's a children's party, and they're celebrating opening a new wing at a library. It's kind of hard to go from A to B, and that's something you do virtually every day as a journalist. ","file":{"id":290692,"video_id":"2705079599001","name":"1151-PhotoJournalist2","duration":219917,"thumbnail_url":null}});