Public service, ethics, objectivity, autonomy and immediacy are still often considered the core values of professional journalism. However, photojournalistic work has confronted historic changes since the advent of digitalization in the late 1980s. Professional photojournalists have been caught manipulating news images, video production has become a major part of news photographers' work, and newspapers freely publish photographs and videos taken by the general public.The present article examines how news photographers negotiate these changes in photojournalistic work practices, and how they define their professional ambitions in the digital age. Photojournalists' articulations of professionalism are approached in relation to three digital innovations in photojournalism: digital photo editing, video production and user-generated images in newspapers. The empirical data consist of an online survey of and interviews with photojournalists in Finland. In the final analysis, it is suggested that the core ideals of photojournalism have to be renegotiated, because the work environment has changed drastically.

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Photojournalism professionals play a key role in producing and choosing the visual coverage that we see in the daily news media. This article focuses on photo editors and other photojournalism professionals behind the news images, and explores how they see and look at pictures professionally in order to decide what is newsworthy. The actual work practices of photojournalism professionals were scrutinized by using methods of newsroom observation and interviews at three media organizations. The theoretical framework applies ethnographic studies of vision in professional practices that consider vision as a socially situated activity and education of attention. The findings suggest that the education of the professional eye of photojournalism practitioners involves informal and everyday work practices that include characteristics of an apprenticeship. Finally, four areas where the professional knowledge accumulates were found: (1) constant following of news; (2) the use of reference images; (3) the use of specific software; and (4) social interaction among the professionals. In conclusion, it is argued that photojournalism professionals’ visual expertise is poorly understood. The shared vision is constitutive for the social organization of the profession while it concurrently narrows the visual coverage published in the media.

Artikkelissa käsitellään empiirisen aineiston avulla objektiivisen lehtikuvan paradoksia, jossa kuvien myönnetään olevan aina-jo-käsiteltyjä, mutta samalla puolustetaan niiden käsittelemättömyyttä ja autenttisuutta. Tuorein esimerkki tulee Reutersilta, joka irtisanoi kuvaajan elokuussa 2006 kuvankäsittelyn vuoksi ja julkaisi sen jälkeen tiukat kuvankäsittelyä koskevat ohjeet. Artikkelissa sovelletaan Michel Foucault’n tematisointeja tiedon ja vallan välisistä suhteista, ja kytketään niitä yhteen journalistisiin käytäntöihin liittyvän tutkimusperinteen kanssa. Artikkelissa vastataan siihen, millä tavoin käsitys objektiivisuudesta rakentuu kuvajournalistisissa käytännöissä ja toiseksi, miten objektiivisuus voidaan ymmärtää tiedon tuotannoksi Foucault’n teoretisointien valossa

This article explores the practices of selecting news images that depict death at a global picture agency, national picture agency and a news magazine. The study is based on ethnographic observations and interviews ( N = 30) from three Western-based news organisations, each representing a link in the complex international news-image circulation process. Further, the organisations form an example of a chain of filters through which most of the news images produced for the global market have to pass before publication. These filters are scrutinised by the empirical case studies that examine the professionals’ ethical reasoning regarding images of violence and death. This research contributes to an understanding of the differences and similarities between media organisations as filters and sheds light on their role in shaping visual coverage. This study concludes that photojournalism professionals’ ethical decision-making is discursively constructed around three frames: (1) shared ethics, (2) relative ethics and (3) distributed ethics. All the organisations share certain similar conceptions of journalism ethics at the level of ideals. On the level of workplace practices and routines, a mixture of practical preconditions, journalism’s self-regulation, business logic and national legislation lead to differences in the image selection practices. It is argued that the ethical decision-making is distributed between – and sometimes even outsourced to – colleagues working in different parts of the filtering chain. Finally, this study suggests that dead or suffering bodies are often invisible in the images of the studied media organisations.