A Photo Finish at the Sun Times?

Chicago Sun Times (Photo credit: stu_spivack)

The Chicago Sun Times recently and suddenly laid off all 28 people in its full-time photography staff.  This included photographers and editors for its flagship paper and all of its suburban papers.

My first reaction was how could that only be 28 people?  To cover all of Chicagoland?  Including the suburbs?

My second reaction was this must be the beginning of the end for a once venerable major market newspaper.  How long can the Chicago Sun Times last without photographers and photo editors?  After all, if a picture is worth a thousand words, reporters are going to have to write a lot more to make up for missing photos.  Right?

Not so, says the leadership at the Sun Times.  Freelancers and reporters will provide plenty of photos, they say.  Plus, the move was precipitated by a shift to more video content for its online presence.

So, in reality, this move is the start of a new beginning for the newspaper that started in Chicago almost 170 years ago.  This move should be seen as a bold move into the brave, sorta new world of online journalism.  This is a move forward; a positive future-affirming strategic step.  So says the leadership of the Sun Times Media Group, the Sun Times parent organization.

As a subscriber of two daily and two weekly newspapers (not the Sun Times though because they stopped delivering where I live many years ago), I hope they are right.  

As a believer in the importance of having multiple journalistic voices in a community, I hope they are right.

As a lover of photography, including photojournalism, I suspect that they are wrong.  I am afraid that the Sun Times leadership will soon find the power that amazing photography has to draw readers and attention to their publication.  And that the lack of it will make it easier to ignore their publication.  I suspect they will learn that there are some stories that need to be told pictorially to really have an impact.  I worry that other newspapers will follow suit and will count on writers, presumably with their cellphones, to snap pictures while they are trying to get a story, forcing them to do neither as well as they could.

I hope that this is just a strategic move and that the Sun Times continues their long and fruitful contribution to Chicago journalism.  I worry that this is another sign of the slow, creeping demise of print journalism.

I can just picture it.

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