Interesting thread. One site in the USA now has a sort of bidding process for story ideas, this may be a good way in the future for people with good story ideas to raise the cash to do so. Those who put the cash in can get a bit of the profits from the venture.

Still, high paying magazine commissions have been disappearing for years and it is clear that knocking on those doors is perhaps a bit fruitless for most photojournalists.

I think many of the problems in financing journalism are to do with our out-dated economic system and some form of new one may well create an environment where money is used better and profit is not the only factor.

Though I am no Adam Smith myself, and I have not heard of anything which improves upon capitalism as yet. Perhaps some sort of competitive communalism will replace it and then things may look very different.

Micro-payments on a “per article read” basis may also work well, though figuring out the system of how this would work is tricky. Clearly Google Ads are pretty useless for earning anything like a basic income, though the model may well work out with a different company and better security.

Still, only a few percent of visitors click on ads – from wherever they come – and this does not make for much profit.

I am thinking about putting my own photo essays and in-depth projects into my own books – which Magnum has done a lot in the past – and perhaps as a magazine. Maybe some will work together and publish their work in one publication on a quarterly basis.

iPhones and iPads make it easier for people to comfortably read electronic publications and this may end up being the market. Selling affordable publications to these devices may well be the future.

Still, it looks like a hard and very difficult road to navigate and like always, some may fall by the wayside.

Apple could do more on this by making easier publishing tools to sell publications on iTunes and advanced printing presses could deliver print copies to those who desire them for a higher fee than the digital book or magazine.

Advertising may still be important in this arena and circulation and reader demographics may help to get someone like Canon or whatever to place adverts in these publications.

Personally, I have some schooling in graphic design and layout and I write too. So I can make my own books from start to finish. Others may decide to combine their talents – writing and pictures – and work with other photographers and writers.

So perhaps the days of the established newspaper brand are numbered for many. Some strong brands, like the New York Times and The Telegraph in London may survive, though others may have to close.

Smaller publications with a network of international correspondents may do better without the large cost of a magazine office. Popular publications may well do a lot better financially than the large behemoth brand dailies and weeklies with their high overheads.

In other words it is very much like the opening line of A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens; “It was the best of times. It was the worst of times…”!

Content was once king. Now distribution is. Magnum, I suspect has come to know that the key to future financial success is not just to have the content but to have means to independently distribute it at the same time.

The big publishers felt a lock on content (hence horrible contacts with providers) was enough. What they failed to realize was that their distribution system was antiquated. Now they have loads of content that they don;t even know how to give away,

I love good beer, and micro breweries are an example of the democratization of brewing. So might Magnum be that to photojournalism.

Sorry to drag on. So from what I can gather, the content is just being created by the photographer and/ or agency instead of the magazine or company, but the problem is still who will to pay for it.

It’s great that we do not need the mother ship to get work out there, but still the problem is who will is willing to pay ?

I mean 20,000 facebook fans that have no plans to ever buy my work doesn’t help things much.

So it’s pick-up stories? I just hope they can recoup the expenses on that scenario.

In the early 70s,after working my way up the ladder, I began to get assignments from magazines while they still ran photo stories and paid to get good ones. By ’75 those days were all but gone, and photojournalism started on it slide downward ending up where it is today. However, I have always felt that good photojournalism has made a great contribution to society over many decades, and I feel that a good thing like will always find a way back. Technology tortured the profession for the past decade, and now I think it is finally about to resuscitate it.

I really hope so.

Jeremy

absolutely right…

more power to them.. looking forward to see where it all goes..
d