I had the pleasure of hearing Tom Kennedy, the former director of photography at National Geographic and former multimedia editor at the Washington Post, twice at the Newhouse School. Both times, he addressed key issues facing the medium of photojournalism and ways in which photojournalism can transition into the digital age.
With newspapers fighting to save their medium in the digital age, photographs are the first part of features that are cut out because they are expensive to shoot and to maintain. In order to save photojournalism and prevent photography from becoming non-existent in the newspaper world, Kennedy proposed that photojournalism move away from solely being concerned with still photography to incorporating multimedia. Kennedy stated that multimedia has the ability to allow photojournalists to tell stories with clarity and power. By adding in sound, sound/slide, or video technology, photojournalistic pieces will allow for the audience to connect emotionally with stories and issues that are far from their comfort zones and their own personal experiences. Multimedia photojournalism has the ability to add emotion and a voice to each journalistic piece that is explored. Multimedia journalism does not aim to replace traditional journalism, but it does aim to combine aspects of the digital age (video, sound/slide, etc) with aspects of the aging traditional media (text). Multimedia photojournalism has the ability to capture and control an audience in ways that traditional photojournalism/journalism has not been able to do as the line dividing the digital age and traditional media grows deeper. Tom Kennedy’s ideas for the future of photojournalism certainly seem promising, and I for one am excited to see if multimedia photojournalism can really take off and move traditional photojournalism into the digital age.
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