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PDN has published a lengthy Q&A with Stephen Mayes, the managing director of the photo agency VII, about the future of photojournalism—who the clients will be, whether the editorial and newspaper markets will become viable again, what the channels of distribution will be, and more. An excerpt:
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SM: I think the online opportunity is huge. What I’ve been doing is looking at successful online businesses in completely unrelated fields, and trying to figure out what makes them successful—why are they thriving when the magazines are not in the online world? And what I’ve found is that there are certain ways of operating, there are certain rules you can apply, there are certain procedures you can follow, which seem to be very transferable to photography. What I find this translates into is being a publisher. One can use the Internet in a way that is much more controllable and manageable and serves a lot more interests than working in print.…
PDN: But if you are going to set VII up as the publisher, then, the idea is that at some point readers would be directed to your site. You would be hosting your stories, your content.
SM: That’s right. And what’s interesting about that is we all do this already. As I went through this whole process of seeing how it all works, what I realized is that we’re doing this at the moment, it’s just we’re really badly configured. Magnum, VII, you name it, we all follow a similar model, which is we show our wares online. We do publish at the moment, and anyone from China to Seattle can check in and see what’s there. But what we don’t do is present it in a way that is user friendly. We present it in a way that has one purpose, which is to speak to picture professionals and picture buyers. And what I realized is that it only takes a small amount of reconfiguration to change how we present this stuff.…
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Agencies as publishers. I think that’s a pretty major shift. You need editors, writers—people who have experience reading an audience and interacting with them. This is a very different set of skills from identifying photographic talent and trying to place their images. It sounds risky, to say the least.
“…There’s always an element of risk,” Mayes says, “but at this point doing nothing is more risky than trying stuff out. I think the status quo is the riskiest possible position to maintain.”
You can read the complete Q&A here.
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Who will fund the future of photojournalism?
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PDN has published a lengthy Q&A with Stephen Mayes, the managing director of the photo agency VII, about the future of photojournalism—who the clients will be, whether the editorial and newspaper markets will become viable again, what the channels of distribution will be, and more. An excerpt:
…
Agencies as publishers. I think that’s a pretty major shift. You need editors, writers—people who have experience reading an audience and interacting with them. This is a very different set of skills from identifying photographic talent and trying to place their images. It sounds risky, to say the least.
“…There’s always an element of risk,” Mayes says, “but at this point doing nothing is more risky than trying stuff out. I think the status quo is the riskiest possible position to maintain.”
You can read the complete Q&A here.
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