The report comes from Mashable, which says 20 full-time staffers got their notices today, and that the newspaper will instead use freelance photographers and reporters shooting with their cameras.

I found out about this by following the Photo Center Northwest on Twitter (recommended), which I mention because it's not just a journalism story, but also an art story, in that it's about a way of looking at the world. I'm not certain that photojournalists necessarily see the world in a way that's quantifiably, specifically different from the way that writing journalists do (see? It's part of the problem that there's not even an equivalent word for writers—we're just called "journalists" while shooters are called "photojournalists").

But there are less quantifiable ways that imagemakers see stories differently from wordassemblers, and there is also the secret fact, now being exploited for its sheer moneysaving capacity, that keeping a staff of shooters and a staff of writers can sometimes mean having two people on a single story who have devoted their lives and the lives of their families to the project of reaching out into the world and shaping a corner of it into story form in the simple hope that other humans might learn a new true thing.