DreamWorks has deep experience with kid-focused content. It has already launched multiple successful television offshoots of blockbuster children’s movies. The first, Penguins of Madagascar, launched in 2009 after the success of the company’s Madagascar movie franchise, and will launch a new season this summer on Nickelodeon. In fact, every single one of the company’s four animated television series for both Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network has been renewed and continues to draw views from pint-sized fans who can’t get enough of their favorite characters.

Even better for Netflix, its first series under the deal with Dreamworks, Turbo: F.A.S.T., piggybacks on the soon-to-be-released Turbo — giving the streaming service plenty of room to develop the show around a fresh audience and a new character. That could lay the foundation to move other successful DreamWorks’ properties to Netflix, beyond the 300 hours of original programming included in this deal.

The deal  – which also helps fill a void Netflix created when its partnership with Viacom fizzled out – stands to round out its successful programming for adult viewers, namely House of Cards and the revival of Arrested Development. By banking on already-known characters like Shrek and Po, Netflix creates more likelihood that moms and dads will make the subscription service a fixture in households. And that could help establish the company full time in the kids programming arena, where it’s tried to gain a foothold over the last few years.

The first piece was a column by NYT public editor Margaret Sullivan on the weekend, about the recent explosive NSA revelations, which were reported primarily by the Guardian — a relative newcomer to the U.S. news scene. Sullivan was responding to a number of reader comments asking why the Times had missed this particular bombshell, and wondering whether the newspaper had been approached but had chosen not to publish the story.

News will find its own outlet

As Sullivan explains in her piece, the NYT apparently wasn’t contacted by Snowden. But it’s understandable that some readers would wonder whether the paper had decided not to go with the story, since something similar happened in 2005 with another story about government surveillance: at the urging of the Bush administration, the Times sat on the story for more than a year — something Edward Snowden said influenced his desire not to go to the newspaper with his NSA leak. As Sullivan notes:

“The delay hasn’t been forgotten. The video journalist Laura Poitras, who worked on the N.S.A. stories in both The Post and The Guardian, said the earlier delay by The Times influenced Mr. Snowden’s decision on where to take his information. What’s more, when a video or article released anywhere can go viral in minutes, the outlet is less important.”

Meanwhile, in a separate piece published Sunday, NYT media writer David Carr talks about another story that got away: in this case, the story about Toronto mayor Rob Ford and his alleged crack-smoking behavior, which appeared first on Gawker — and then subsequently in some of Toronto’s major newspapers, which had apparently been working on the story for some time.

Like Sullivan, Carr notes that certain news stories don’t wait for traditional journalistic organizations to get around to reporting them — that “big news forges its own path,” as he puts it. And he also notes that this is just a more recent version of something that has been occurring for some time:

“Traditional news organizations used to be free to break news — or not — in their backyard and on their chosen beats. Now they have to be looking over their shoulder — at everyone. And in virtually every aspect of culture, from business to technology to fashion, the big guys now compete with a range of Web sites that break their share of news through obsessiveness and hyperfocus.”

The path of least resistance

The “hyperfocus” that Carr mentions is an important point. As I argued in a recent post, the Guardian likely got the Snowden leaks in part because of the obsessiveness and focus of Glenn Greenwald, the lawyer-turned-blogger who has devoted much of his writing to cataloguing the government’s malfeasance related to WikiLeaks and whistle-blower Bradley Manning — a point that journalism professor Jay Rosen made in a recent post as well.

In the not-so-distant past, the New York Times was one of the main platforms for breaking this kind of news, and perhaps even the main platform. But given its behavior in cases like the pre-Iraq war reporting of Judith Miller and in the case of the 2005 surveillance story, it’s not surprising that leakers like Snowden might decide to take their story elsewhere — and there are plenty of other outlets for that information, including places like WikiLeaks.

Carr is right that “big news forges its own path.” In a sense, it is like water, which takes the path of least resistance. The New York Times and other outlets used to be the water company, but they are no longer the only outlet — and if they provide too much resistance, the news will flow elsewhere. Whether that is ultimately good or bad for journalism remains to be seen, but it is a fact.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / SoulAD and Flickr user Jan-Arief Purwanto

In a nutshell, the product allows advertisers to target their ads to specific pieces of commentary that appear on the Post‘s opinion pages (what newspapers used to refer to in the old print days as the “op-ed” page, because it was opposite the newspaper’s editorial page). So brands or commercial entities sign up for an account, and then have the ability to post up to 600 words of commentary that appear just below the official Post opinion piece, right before the comments.

One of the issues that gets brought up about sponsored content is the confusion that it allegedly produces in readers when they can’t determine what is advertising and what isn’t — but as Peter Kafka points out at All Things Digital, no one with anything close to 20-20 vision is going to be fooled by the Post‘s “sponsored views.” They appear in a box, which has a different-colored background, and there’s an (admittedly rather small) identifier that says “sponsored views.” It’s pretty obvious that they are something separate.

A worthwhile experiment

Kafka is sceptical about whether these ads will be effective or not — since they are so clearly advertising and not content — but what I think is smart about the idea is that it gives advertisers one of the things they want so badly from content (and get so infrequently from newspapers), and that is targeting. In some ways, it’s a little like what the New York Times started to do by offering ads on stories that are trending on social networks, but even better because it is targeted by topic.

One of the trends we talk about a lot at paidContent is the idea that advertisers have effectively become their own media companies, with the ability to publish their own content and reach their own audiences. In order to appeal to advertisers, publishers like the Post have to try harder — and one way to do that is to offer them the ability to reach readers about a topic that they have some kind of agenda on (the Post also offers something called BrandConnect).

As for how much the Post might make from this kind of venture, that’s unclear. The pricing depends on “timing and other factors” — which is also smart, since it allows the newspaper to theoretically charge more for issues that have blown up in a viral way, or charge more for the ability to target something within minutes of it being posted. None of that is going to change the newspaper’s overall financial picture much, but it’s not stupid.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Getty / Chris Jackson

Although it’s difficult to discern the precise motives of the leaker (who revealed himself on the weekend as 29-year-old former CIA technical staffer Edward Snowden), the fact that both Greenwald and the Guardian are to some extent “outsiders” may have helped them land what could be one of the biggest national-security stories since Watergate. And the stories — a series that Greenwald says has only just begun — will undoubtedly burnish the Guardian‘s reputation in the U.S., not to mention its web traffic.

Triumph of the blogger as journalist

As journalism professor Jay Rosen noted on Twitter, if nothing else, Greenwald’s repeated scoops on this particular story are perhaps the best possible response to the long-running debate in professional journalism circles over whether “bloggers” should be thought of as journalists. Although the debate should have died out long ago, the term is still seen by some as a pejorative label (Greenwald was a lawyer and author before he became a blogger).

Even the New York Times chose to refer to Greenwald primarily as a blogger in its profile of him following the PRISM story, something the newspaper’s own public editor said she felt was somewhat dismissive of his accomplishments. But while Greenwald may not have been trained as a journalist, he clearly has enough skills in that area to put together a compelling news story — and told the Times that he uses his legal training to make sure the holes in a story are filled.

Being a blogger isn’t the only way in which Greenwald stands apart from the members of the traditional media establishment: Unlike most, he has been an unabashed supporter of former Army private Bradley Manning — who is currently on trial for giving classified information to WikiLeaks — and of the value that comes from leaking such information in the public interest. It’s not hard to see how that might have attracted Edward Snowden.

Greenwald is also a literal outsider as well, since he lives most of the time in Brazil with his partner. The two can’t move to the United States as a couple because the U.S. government doesn’t recognize same-sex couples when one partner is applying for a residency visa.

Outsiders sometimes get the scoops

And finally, The Guardian itself is something of an outsider in the U.S. media, and certainly when it comes to covering Washington or national security and military topics. Although the British media entity has had a U.S. unit based in New York city for almost two years now (something editor Janine Gibson and others continually reminded other media outlets of, every time they referred to it somewhat dismissively as a British newspaper) it is still seen by many as the arm of a British news outlet.

In some ways, that too may have helped attract a story like Snowden’s: there’s a suggestion in a Washington Post story that Snowden lost interest in working with the Post after the paper contacted the U.S. government to get a response to the leak of top-secret NSA documents. Greenwald, however, says this account of events is incorrect and that he had been talking with Snowden before the whistle-blower first went to the Washington Post.

According to Laura Poitras, a documentary film-maker who had been contacted by Snowden at about the same time as Greenwald — and wound up working with both the Post and the Guardian on their stories about him — the former CIA staffer had “a suspicion of mainstream media,” especially the New York Times, because it sat on a previous wire-tapping story for over a year. U.S. editor Gibson also said in an interview with The Huffington Post that the Guardian was able to take a much more skeptical role in pursuing the story than a U.S. newspaper might:

“There is a lack of skepticism on a whole in the media on the issue of national security… a sense that it is unpatriotic to question the role that the security services play.”

In some ways, the success of the Guardian in this particular case seems to be based on the combination of two powerful brands: one being the brand that Greenwald has fashioned for himself as a staunch defender of civil liberties — and also someone who isn’t shy of tilting at windmills — and the other being the Guardian‘s brand as an alternative voice to the CNNs or the other established U.S. media players when it comes to such issues. Both were likely powerful selling points when it came to a story about a top-secret spying campaign.

Whether that recipe continues to work for both Greenwald and the Guardian with future stories about other topics remains to be seen, but it certainly seems to have paid off in this case.

Note: This post was updated at 10 p.m. on Monday to include more details about how Snowden contacted Glenn Greenwald

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Umberto Salvagnin and Jan-Arief Purwanto

A WPP release says that the partnership will allow the group’s various units to “leverage Twitter data” in order to deliver more effective campaigns, “enhanced targeting” and more real-time insight for the firm’s clients, and that the two will work together to approach key clients. Sir Martin Sorrell, the chairman of WPP, said Twitter’s relevance continues to grow “not only as a social platform, but also as a window into consumer attitudes and behaviour in real time.”

Sorrell’s interest in expanding his firm’s relationship with Twitter should probably be a wake-up call for traditional media companies, most of whom are used to getting the bulk of their advertising revenue from WPP’s clients. Sorrell said recently that he views Twitter, Google and Facebook as “media owners masquerading as technology companies,” and Twitter’s real-time behavior analytics are something many media players can’t even hope to duplicate.

Making Twitter ads more targeted

While there is no dollar value on the WPP deal, it will almost certainly be worth tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars for Twitter: the recent deal with Starcom (a unit of Publicis) was described by the Financial Times as being worth “hundreds of millions of dollars” over a period of several years. The Starcom arrangement also provided clients of the firm with preferential access to advertising slots within Twitter’s network. At the time that deal was announced, the global CEO of Starcom Mediavest told the FT that Twitter “in a very short period of time, has gone from an experiment to something that is essential.”

Much of what advertisers are interested in is the real-time information network’s ability to function as a “second screen” for TV viewers, and Twitter has been devoting most of its resources to capitalizing on this phenomenon: the company recently launched a series of partnerships with broadcasters and content companies called Twitter Amplify, and has also been refining its ability to offer advertisers targeting based on specific keywords.

Twitter’s ability to target advertising messages, and specifically those related to video, got a big boost when the company acquired Bluefin Labs in February. And eMarketer recently estimated that based on some of its recent moves related to advertising, Twitter’s ad revenue in 2013 could hit $1 billion.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / Eldorado3D

Although it’s tempting to compare these events to the uprisings that took place during the so-called “Arab Spring,” sociologist Zeynep Tufekci — who also happens to be Turkish — has pointed out in a perceptive essay that what is happening in Istanbul is very different. For one thing, Turkey has a democratically elected government, and there has not been the same history of brutal repression as in Egypt and elsewhere. So this is not about the overthrow of a dictator.

Local media initially ignored the story

That said, however, there is enough popular dissatisfaction with the government of Prime Minister Erdogan that what began as a small and peaceful protest over the building of a shopping mall has turned into a series of mass demonstrations against the authorities — events that appear to be fuelled by a number of issues, including the government’s aggressive redevelopment policies and some festering historical animosity towards the ethnic Kurdish population.

And what have the local media — or even the local branches of international media — been doing since this all began weeks ago? Mostly ignoring the demonstrations and paying attention to other things, including a special broadcast report about penguins that CNN Turkey chose to air in the middle of one of the largest demonstrations, to the chagrin of many Turks. Other channels broadcast cooking shows and historical documentaries.

Remember CNN Turkey aired penguin documentaries during worst clashes? Desperate Turks try to lure it back to news. twitter.com/sinancanyurt/s…

— Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) June 4, 2013

Among the reasons given for the lack of coverage are the fact that some of Turkey’s major news entities are sympathetic to the Islamic government of Prime Minister Erdogan, and also that these large media conglomerates have corporate parents who are beholden to the government because of their interests in other businesses like mining and energy. In frustration, some of those involved in the protests started a crowdfunding effort in order to buy a full-page ad in the New York Times, and raised more than their goal of $53,000 in less than 24 hours.

Social media filled the news vacuum

In response to this information vacuum, social media has become even more important as a source of news about what is happening and where. Hashtags on Twitter and Facebook groups and other tools — including private mobile-messaging services, since the Turkish government has reportedly been blocking some public internet services — have become a crucial way of getting information for many Turkish residents. Just as they did in Tahrir Square in Egypt, these tools have allowed those who are experiencing the news to report on it themselves.

So while social media and tools like Twitter were criticized for doing damage to people’s understanding of what was happening during the Boston bombings or Hurricane Sandy, because of the false information being circulated, those same tools have become a lifeline for many in Istanbul and elsewhere in Turkey because their local media is not doing its job properly.

In fact, Twitter became such a crucial tool for some of those in Turkey that the prime minister railed against the service, calling it “the worst menace to society.” And in a somewhat darker move — one that sounds a little more like Egypt or China than a democratic nation like Turkey — as many as two dozen protesters were detained by the Turkish authorities on Tuesday because they were accused of using Twitter to foment unrest, and charges could be laid.

Letting citizens know they aren’t alone

In her essay on the effect of social media on the way that information flows during such events (something she also wrote about while the Arab Spring was taking place ), Tufekci notes one crucial aspect of what Twitter and Facebook and other services do during such events: in a nutshell, they allow others to discover that they are not alone. The breaking down of this “pluralistic ignorance,” as Tufekci describes it — helped jump-start demonstrations in Egypt when decades of repression and poverty had been unable to do so.

“The key conceptual issue here is not digital versus non-digital but visibility, accessibility and signaling power. Street demonstrations, in that regard, are a form of social media in that they are powerful to the degree that they allow citizens to signal a plurality to their fellow citizens, and to help break pluralist ignorance. Overall, social media are altering mechanisms of collective action in societies and we have just begun to understand this fundamental shift.”

In the end, social media and networked systems of all kinds accomplished in Turkey what the traditional media is supposed to but didn’t: namely, informing Turks about what was happening in their country, and at the same time letting those involved know that their voices were being heard by the government. And that is the real power of networked media.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Petteri Sulonen

Bruni’s column, entitled “Who Needs Reporters?,” describes a series of recent events in which public figures did an end run around the mainstream media: in one case, former presidential candidate Michele Bachmann announced via a video message that she wouldn’t seek a fifth term in Congress, and in the second case former Congressman Anthony Weiner announced that he was going to make a bid to become mayor of New York City. A third incident involved Senator Hilary Clinton, who announced her views on gay marriage.

Has the fourth estate become less relevant?

The NYT columnist argues that this kind of end-run around the traditional media potentially does far more harm to the fourth estate than the much more controversial attacks on whistleblowers and journalists who have received government leaks:

“Our role and relevance are arguably even more imperiled by politicians’ ability, in this newly wired world of ours, to go around us and present themselves in packages that we can’t simultaneously unwrap. To get a message out, they don’t have to beseech a network’s indulgence. They don’t have to rely on a newspaper’s attention.”

Bruni goes on to say the videos made by Clinton and Bachmann are “harbingers of an era in which YouTube is the public square, and the fourth estate is a borderline obsolescent one.” And he admits some may see the decline of the journalistic sector as a good thing, given the level of mistrust many have in the media — which he blames on “our cynicism, superficiality… and tendency to see all politics in terms of the contest rather than the content.”

In the end, the Times columnist argues that journalists are needed more than ever because the ability to reach an audience directly makes it easier for politicians to “construct a Potemkin identity, a facade at odds with anything behind it,” and therefore journalistic skills are required to get behind that facade and reveal the truth — or to “poke and meddle,” as he puts it.

Move up the journalism value chain

In a way, I would argue that the phenomenon of “sources going direct” (as blogging pioneer Dave Winer has described it in the past) has the potential to make journalists — or at least journalism of a certain kind — both less necessary and more necessary at the same time.

What it makes less necessary is the kind of stenographic journalism that consists of simply showing up to a news conference and writing down what a politician says, or rewriting a press release that has been handed out. As Brian Stelter noted during a social-media weekend last year, if your job is just to get Rupert Murdoch to say things, having the News Corp. chairman saying things on Twitter to some extent makes your job a lot harder.

Looked at another way, however, this allows journalists of all kinds — both professional and amateur or “citizen” journalists — to move up the value chain, as disruption expert Clay Christensen has described in his recent paper on the evolution of media. If we see the media as providing a service (or “jobs to be done,” as Christensen calls it) then part of that service used to be telling people what politicians said, or what the government wanted them to hear.

Now that this can be accomplished largely (or increasingly) without journalists, it should free up a whole class of reporters to do more value-added journalism that explains what things mean, or questions the statements of politicians. All they have to do, as Om has explained, is choose what to amplify and what not to amplify. And won’t we all be better off if that happens?

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Jan Arief Purwanto and Shutterstock / wellphoto

Whatever you think of Tesla or its founder Elon Musk (who also happens to be working on sending people into space), his company has defied some long-held beliefs of the car business, including the idea that bespoke car companies always fail, that electric power isn’t ready for prime time in the consumer automotive space, and that car companies can’t sell direct to the consumer (my colleague Katie Fehrenbacher has a great post on Tesla here).

The most disruptive force in media?

The idea of picking a media company as the Tesla of that industry isn’t to find a one-to-one equivalent, for what should be fairly obvious reasons: for one thing, the car business involves making and selling expensive physical products — products that can’t be digitized and copied or aggregated the way that media content can. And there’s probably no development in new media that corresponds directly to Tesla’s ambitious bet on the long-term value of electric power (although I would argue that the use of crowdsourcing comes fairly close).

That said, it’s worth thinking about who has been the most innovative company in media over the last decade or so, and I think the Huffington Post deserves that title — although there are some caveats to that, which I will get into. In discussing this with colleagues, some voted for Twitter or Facebook, and it’s true that they have been extremely disruptive (Twitter most of all, I think, for a number of reasons). But they are still outside the industry to some extent in that they don’t compete directly, although they may want to.

For me, The Huffington Post is the Tesla of media because it is the closest thing to a traditional entity that sprang into being, seemingly out of nowhere — sui generis, as the saying goes — and very quickly forced the industry to question a lot of long-held assumptions. Among those assumptions were the following:

No one of any quality would write for free: Although newspapers and other media companies have always taken occasional submissions from readers or experts and run them for nothing, the Huffington Post was the first to show that you could build a substantial media entity on that approach, and that in many cases the quality could match or exceed what newspapers pay for.

Users wouldn’t want a news aggregator: This was one of the most absurd assumptions, since many newspapers themselves are essentially just aggregators, but there was some scepticism that the Huffington Post would be able to succeed by running excerpts from other news sites. In fact, many readers saw this as a valuable service rather than an affront to journalism.

A new entity couldn’t build a large audience: Even after the Huffington Post launched and it was obvious that it appealed to many online readers, traditional media players said it wouldn’t be able to compete with established brand names like the New York Times. In 2011, its traffic exceeded the Times.

Viral content can’t be treated like a science: Before BuzzFeed, there was the Huffington Post, which was the first to show that fairly simple tools (integrating Facebook’s open platform, adding sharing buttons and using strategies like A/B testing for headlines) could increase web readership almost exponentially.

A viral-media site couldn’t evolve: Once it became clear that the Huffington Post was not going away, and that it had developed a large audience, there were those who believed it would always be a sideshow devoted to either lowest-common-denominator content and/or thoughtless aggregation. In 2012, the site won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism.

Huffington Post was, but now BuzzFeed is

All of this helped The Huffington Post build what became a $315-million organization in a little over five years, right under the noses of the largest and most well-funded media entities on the planet. And the value of the company was determined by the acquisition offer in 2011 from AOL, then part of the sprawling AOL-Time Warner empire, something that many saw as a huge validation of the Huffington approach.

This is also where the caveats come in: For me at least, much of the early innovative energy that The Huffington Post had seems to be gone. That might be because time has moved on, or because it has been absorbed by a giant entity and has less freedom to move (and a lot more internal politics), but it seems as though much of the innovative spirit has gone elsewhere — to newer entities like BuzzFeed, for example, which shares much of the same DNA as the early Huffington Post, via co-founder Jonah Peretti.

BuzzFeed has not only doubled-down on some of those elements, such as the viral content and the aggregation approach, but it is forging new ground as well — including an attempt to build a scalable model using nothing but “native” advertising or sponsored content. And it has also evolved, just as the Huffington Post did, adding more long-form writing and branching out into politics and other categories that were seen by some as being incompatible with its model.

Does all of this make BuzzFeed founder Peretti the Elon Musk of media? We’ll have to save that for a future post. If you have any of your own suggestions for who deserves to be the Tesla Motors of media, feel free to add them below.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Scott Beale and George Kelly

As Maynard notes, there are a number of disruptive effects in the media industry that parallel what happened to car-makers — including the outsourcing of non-core functions, something the Chicago Sun-Times did rather dramatically last week by laying off its entire 28-person photography desk. The attempts by newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune to outsource hyperlocal news gathering through third-party providers like Journatic would be another example.

Outsourcing is a reality

This is roughly similar to what happened to car-makers, Maynard says, who found that it was cheaper to outsource the production of their vehicles:

“These days, car companies can find others to do virtually every aspect of an automobile. They can contract out design and engineering work, hire marketing companies, find manufacturers who have the capacity to build their products. Except for Tesla, they’ve already turned selling their vehicles over to franchisees.”

Media companies — and the journalists who work for them — don’t like to think of their business as being similar to manufacturing, but in a broad sense it is: the newspaper is a product that is stamped out at the end of an assembly-line style process that functions much the same way it has for 50 years, with some slight differences. And many of the legacy costs that have driven some newspaper companies into bankruptcy come from that industrial process.

Like Maynard, disruption expert Clay Christensen has also talked about how the automakers learned from their newer competitors and became more flexible, both through outsourcing and other means. In a major research paper he wrote along with Harvard fellow David Skok, Christensen looked at how the newspaper business is being dismantled, and what it can do to survive.

Focus on what customers want from you

What’s really interesting about the disruption in the auto business, as Maynard notes, is that everything didn’t get outsourced. What car-makers discovered was that they needed to retain control over some things in order to achieve the kind of design or performance or reliability demanded by their customers — the things that were crucial to their brand.

In the newspaper business, customers are called readers, but the overall principle is the same, Maynard argues: a company has to decide (or learn) what they offer that is unique or outstanding when compared to their competitors, and then focus like a laser on that thing. If you’re the New York Times, maybe it’s foreign reporting — if you’re BuzzFeed it’s probably cats, or at least humor. Which raises the question: Who is the Tesla of the media industry?

“Car companies realized that what they absolutely must do themselves is provide brand character, which is essentially the promise that the company makes to its customers. It doesn’t matter where a BMW is built, whether Germany or South Carolina or South Africa. It does matter how it drives.”

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / Donskarpo

There’s no question that the layoffs were a hugely painful event, not just for the Chicago media but for many fans of photo-journalism. John White, one of those who was laid off — after a 44-year career at the Sun-Times that included a Pulitzer Prize win — said it was like the newspaper “pushed a button and deleted a whole culture of photo-journalism.” (Some speculated that the Sun-Times might have an ulterior motive: in 2008 Newsday fired all 20 staff photographers and later rehired some as multimedia editors).

A dedicated photo desk is a luxury

The cuts were widely criticized as a knee-jerk reaction to financial pressures by newspaper managers who don’t understand or don’t care about journalism: A photo-journalist at the competing Chicago Tribune (which has suffered through some challenges of its own related to outsourcing aspects of its journalism) called the paper’s move “idiocy,” and said the idea that freelancers and reporters with iPhones could replace a staff of professional photographers “idiotic at worst, and hopelessly uninformed at best.”

The New York Times said that before the layoffs the paper had a staff of professionals with the hard-earned ability to tell stories with pictures and now it has “some freelancers and reporters toting cheap cameras with their notebooks and pens.” The writer went on to paraphrase the viewpoint of the Sun-Times presumably: “Who cares about news judgment, composition, story-telling, impact, beauty or whether an image is even in focus? Photos are just something bright and colorful to wrap the text and ads around.”

This is clearly hyperbole, of course. As emotional a moment as it might be when so many jobs are lost — and so much obvious talent — a common theme in much of the coverage of the Sun-Times layoffs is what seems like a deep mistrust of the whole idea of using freelance photographers, or the idea that iPhones used by reporters might suffice in some (not all) cases. But this is misguided: the reality is that almost every newspaper, magazine and wire service uses freelance photo-journalists, many take award-winning photos.

It’s also obviously the case that iPhone or handheld photos are often just as good — or even better, from a real-time, breaking news point of view — than a professional picture. And to denigrate “user-generated content” simply because it comes from potentially (although not always) untrained photographers is to miss the exact same point that the rest of the media industry has been missing about the value of “citizen journalism” or whatever we choose to call it.

Outsourcing and crowdsourcing works

That’s not to say the Sun-Times handled this particular transition well, because it clearly didn’t. Jeff Jarvis says the paper was both right and wrong — right in the sense that there are more photographers and potentially newsworthy photos available everywhere, since everyone has a powerful camera in their pocket, but wrong in the way they handled the change. Instead of letting them all go, he says they should have redefined the job so that photographers would become curators of crowdsourced photos as well as creators.

It would be nice to think the Sun-Times — or any other newspaper — could convince its existing photographers to do that. And maybe some will be able to. But many professional photo-journalists would find that transition difficult if not impossible, just as many professional journalists of all kinds find it hard to admit that at least some aspects of what we call journalism can now be practiced by anyone with a functioning brain-stem, a sense of curiosity and the luck to be close to a breaking news event.

The Sun-Times, like every other newspaper, is having to confront two painful realities: one is that journalism of all kinds is no longer the exclusive purview of a newspaper and its staff — anyone can, and will, practice it, and readers will seek it out elsewhere for a host of reasons, both good and bad. And the second reality is that the cost structure of many mid-size metropolitan newspapers simply doesn’t work any more, and outsourcing is one way of handling that problem — not just for the photo desk, but potentially for copy editing and other functions as well. That is the future, whether we like it or not.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Petteri Sulonen and Shutterstock / Lightpoet