More victims of the digital revolution:
CHICAGO (AP) — The union representing laid-off photographers at the Chicago Sun-Times plans to file a bad-faith bargaining charge with the National Labor Relations Board.
Chicago Newspaper Guild Executive Director Craig Rosenbaum says the charge will be filed in reaction to the Sun-Times Media company's announcement Thursday that it's laying off its entire full-time photography staff.
[. . .]
Sun-Times Media released a statement Thursday to The Associated Press confirming "the very difficult decision" to do away with the positions at the city's tabloid newspaper and its suburban sister publications.
The statement noted that the "business is changing rapidly" and audiences are "seeking more video content with their news."
That "seeking more video content" isn't the whole story, of course. The truth is that anybody can be a photographer taking high-quality (technically speaking) pictures these days, so the demand for good, professional photographers is down. The online world is a lot more visual than the print world, but the tradeoff will be a gradual diminishing of quality. "Faster, faster, faster" does not equate to excellence.
