The Guardian had a nice obit of photographer Bill Francis today which included the observation that he was “passionate about his cameras and equipment, Bill always had the best, favouring a Hasselblad and his family of Leicas.”
But the photograph used to illustrate the piece shows him with a Rolleiflex and a 35mm camera which may or may not be a Leica and indeed might even be a Zeiss Ikonta — viz:
Not a Hasselblad in sight.
LATER: On reflection, I think he is using a Leica. An M3, maybe.
Guess who wants to downplay the scandal of a non-dom billionaire buying marginal constituencies for the Tories?
Here’s the Guardian’s front page this morning:
And here’s the Torygraph’s front page:
There’s a strange paradox in the current gloom afflicting news organisations. On the one hand, the journalistic doomsters believe there is no longer a market for what they produce. On the other hand there’s the Pew Internet & American Life Project’s report which seems to suggest that people can’t get enough of it (news, that is).
In the digital era, news has become omnipresent. Americans access it in multiple formats on multiple platforms on myriad devices. The days of loyalty to a particular news organization on a particular piece of technology in a particular form are gone. The overwhelming majority of Americans (92%) use multiple platforms to get news on a typical day, including national TV, local TV, the internet, local newspapers, radio, and national newspapers. Some 46% of Americans say they get news from four to six media platforms on a typical day. Just 7% get their news from a single media platform on a typical day.
The internet is at the center of the story of how people’s relationship to news is changing. Six in ten Americans (59%) get news from a combination of online and offline sources on a typical day, and the internet is now the third most popular news platform, behind local television news and national television news.
The process Americans use to get news is based on foraging and opportunism. They seem to access news when the spirit moves them or they have a chance to check up on headlines. At the same time, gathering the news is not entirely an open-ended exploration for consumers, even online where there are limitless possibilities for exploring news. While online, most people say they use between two and five online news sources and 65% say they do not have a single favorite website for news. Some 21% say they routinely rely on just one site for their news and information.
I suppose that whaat it comes down to is whether there’s a difference between a demand for something and a market for it. Conventional economics would say that where there’s a demand, there’s always a market.