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April 23, 2008
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I'm by no means a photographer, but I'm pretty sure these photos violate rule one of photography:
People drive pictures.
As soon as gas prices went up, people began documenting the rise for the ages, and news organizations, hungry for consumer-driven content (which they don't have to pay for), started telling people to send in their photos of posted high gas prices from around the nation.
CNN is running with the idea using their iReports (if I were Apple Computer, i'd be suing for CNN's use of the lower-case "i" followed by no space and a capital letter). iReports are all user-generated. They allow CNN, which like other news organizations must be feeling the crunch of changing media standards and expectations and declining revenue, to get content without paying for it.
So what you get with these iReports are a momentary "Wow" factor of high gas prices (or heinous crimes, like CNN did with the iReports when the Virginia Tech shootings happened a year ago.) with little substance. Typically, CNN changes their main homepage photo at least hourly, presumably hoping to drive traffic by regulars all day to see what the "top story" of the hour is. (I include myself in this for national news.)
So never mind if there are no people in the photos, it's the cheapest kind of content, the news execs must tell themselves. And as long as people are thrilled to see a photo they took on CNN's homepage, and as long as the market drives news (I'm not deluding myself, it always will), we'll have these sorts of ploys meant to get something, albeit very small, for free.
But seriously, photos of high gas prices are not news day in and day out. If I wanted to see high gas prices posted on big signs, I'd drive down the street, pay my $3.50/ gallon for gas, and be on my merry way.
In the meantime, call me when prices hit $5/gallon. Now that's news!
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