Over the rainbow: Photojournalists' Discourse about Technological Changes that don't really change anything - or do they?

Author's Abstract:
During the 1980s, several major technological innovations
challenged photojournalists' beliefs about photography's place in
reporting the news. Based on the occupational discourse about new
technology within the major organizations for USA
photojournalists, this paper examines the strategies these
photographers and editors have used to reconstruct their beliefs
about the photograph as a credible representation of actual
events and to reassert the value of the photographs as news.
In response to the emergence of colour photography in the daily
press in the early part of the decade and its conjunction with
the advent of electronic colour (i.e. digitized) imagery and
editing in the late-1980s, photojournalists have been redefining
the nature of the photograph as document, the ethical
guidelines of their work, and their roles and responsibilities
within news organizations. The results have been an apparent
contradiction between (1) specific and identifiable changes in the
style and substance of photojournalism, and (2) an occupational
discourse that reasserts the ideology of photographic truth as the
foundation of photojournalistic practice.