News Photography and the Digital (R)evolution: Continuity and Change in the Practices, Styles, Norms and Values of Photojournalism

This chapter deals with the impact of new digital technologies and new social practices of photographic production and circulation in the field of professional photojournalism since the early 2000s. Focusing on shifting practices, styles, norms, and values, it highlights elements of both continuity and change with the previous analogical age. In particular, it offers an analysis of three major changes: i) the rise of so-called citizen photojournalism, i.e. the possibility for ordinary people to produce photographs that come to be valued and circulated by news organizations; ii) the increasing implementation of digital post-production, i.e. the possibility to digitally retouch or enhance a photo before circulating it, that can consecrate specific aesthetic conventions yet generating considerable controversy in terms of standards and norms; iii) the symbolic struggle for distinction and authorship among top international photojournalists, as an effect of the emergence of non-professional producers and new digital technologies of production and post-production. In the end, the chapter outlines a problematization of the increasingly diffused discoursive transition from the value of “objectivity” to the value of “trustworthiness” within professional photojournalism. As a whole, it urges for more empirical investigations on socially situated practices of digital production as well as on existing institutional frameworks.