JIM MacMillan is comfortable using new social media – he has a Twitter account and 40,000 followers.
But the Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist holds concerns about the threats new media hold for the future of his trade.
“As we move toward independent media and social media, we’re going to see more and more people with less and less ethical training,” he says.
Audiences need to be wary of the difference between “honest, coherent, embedded reporting and the other stuff,” the 48-year-old veteran press photographer told NewsWire during a visit to Whitireia Journalism School.
The number of experienced photojournalists in newspapers is declining rapidly, with staff reductions largely targeting older people who make more money, he says.
“You have less experience in the field, so [young people] are more prone to make [ethical] mistakes.”
The snap ethical decisions that are a part of journalism can sometimes prove to be poor ones.
Mr MacMillan remembers photographing a young mother on Christmas Eve just after she was told her children had been killed in a house fire in Philadelphia, and the disgust in himself afterwards at possibly making “the most unimaginably horrible moment of someone’s life a little bit worse”.
He was angry at his lack of training to deal with traumatic situations and the attitudes of his editors, who simply saw the shot as a front page “Christmas tragedy”.
Mr MacMillan no longer works for a news agency, instead focusing on teaching young journalists how to deal with ethical decisions and the inevitable traumatic events that they will cover.
He is also a member of the Dart Center based at New York’s Columbia University, an organisation set up to help journalists deal with the traumatic events they cover and to recognise post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a real problem for journalists worldwide.
The tide is changing on how PTSD is dealt with by journalists.
“It used to be a matter of drinking it away, suppressing it until the next major event came along.”
The paranoia and other symptoms associated with PTSD were often completely debilitating for Mr MacMillan, causing him to lose sleep and see snipers and insurgents on the streets and buildings of his hometown of Philadelphia.
He visited New Zealand talking to journalists and students during a Dart Centre-funded tour.
