Why are photo departments always among the first to be axed?

©Jes Aznar

1. Visually illiterate management often undervalues photography, thinking photographs are just there to fill or brighten a page, seeing it as decorative rather than a crucial storytelling component.

2. There’s a lack of regard for critical thinking. Newsrooms forget that photos are more than just page fillers — they provide context, evoke emotions, convey complex information, and contribute to the audience’s critical thinking.

3. Unprofessional journalism rely on social media and internet sources for photographs and images, which compromise quality and credibility, instead of employing professional visual journalists who bring expertise and ethics.

Studies show that the use of photos and images has already trumped the use of text in our daily communications as well as in platforms where we get our news. On an average, there are about 3.2 billion images and 720,000 hours of video are shared online daily. Even before the advent of AI, global studies suggest that images and pictures are the most potent form used in misinformation and spreading lies.

Even without photoshop, visuals with misleading content, missing context and false information are common on the internet, and with the help of social platforms, they can be spread far and wide in a matter of minutes.

But the use of visuals and visual literacy is still the least discussed inside news rooms.

Posts with visuals are shared more widely and rapidly than text-only posts and are central to the spread of misinformation. Within this polluted information ecosystem, it’s difficult to discern which visuals are credible. According to The Pew Research Center, almost half of American adults say it’s hard for them to recognize when visuals have been made up or altered. The result is a muddled discourse about what’s true: a majority of American adults say that made-up or altered visuals can create confusion about the facts of current events.

More and more newsrooms are now dipping their hands into multimedia reporting and utilizing social media in their reports. On the other hand, to reduce operational costs further, some mainstream media resort to grabbing images and pictures from social media instead of hiring professionally trained photojournalists. All while claiming that social media is teeming with fake news and misinformation. The most dangerous part is that no one is trained in most of the newsrooms to handle, decipher, and to ethically source images.

For countries like the Philippines and among neighboring Southeast Asian countries, this practice of giving importance to photographs for publishing has proven to be at the bottom of the list due to lack of knowledge of visual journalism among newsroom staff. A collaborative study on the local photojournalism industry launched in 2020 by myself and other media organizations noticed a steep decline in the support for professional visual journalism among mainstream news organizations in the country.

For decades, the issue of pay for photojournalists has been the central battle-cry among practitioners, without realizing that it is caused by a deeper and more disturbing problem — the newsroom’s lack of the basic knowledge of visual reporting.

As the technology and tools to battle the spread of misinformation and fake news especially in the field of image use is still not readily available for journalists, the most basic answer to the problem is a renewed effort in pushing for re-educating newsrooms on the subject of visual journalism in context with the new digital landscape.