It was never the way to succeed in the first place. This happened when photographers took control of the business.

Look at Magnum, a big co-operative with a CEO from Private Equity sitting in an office in New York. I would love to know who drives decisions in that business and from what basis. The Art collective based in Paris or the businessman in New York?

Look at the massive shift in story telling of the photographer’s compared to the attitude of one of its it founding father’s HCB. He was always behind the story and not in front. The context led the product but now the context is all about the photographers. He famously hated to be photographed but now everyone wants their voice front and face all over a multimedia piece.

Having a declining business run by photographers structured to service aspiring photographers means that their personalities will be at the centre of their stories. Their ego’s will push themselves to the front because they will believe that the economic value is specifically derived from their personal genius. “I shot this, I shot that, I believe this is important because… it is my own personal vision that is unique”. I have heard this so many times – it is the photojournalist’s unique personal vision that is the key sales differentiator. It might be in interpersonal relationships that dictate who gets the funds to do the work but this is a business built from the sheer force of personality.

Why? Because the photojournalist has became too big for their boots? NO. They are wonderfully passionate people who believe in their subjects in the main. Their ego’s over a period of time are boosted because they present to the same people – want to be photographers and a captive audience. They go to talks and people who want to be in their position say to them “you are amazing”. In many cases I agree.

This is where it goes wrong. They feed that back to their business people, collect stats from the online propositions that say “want-to-be-photojournalists search for work by existing photojournalists as examples of how to be as great” and wonder why they do not make any real income from it.

It is simple, your audiences are the ever declining pool of want to be photojournalists with declining sources of revenues!

All you are left is to take income from the NGO world – which is not journalism – or ever smaller pools of cash from magazines. Online magazines? Good luck with that because look at the product. What are you really selling? An informed passionate opinion (narrowly focused) or objective journalism (informational and open)?. What is the economic value of an opinion to the mass audience?

It is the failure of ideology that has produced this inward looking un-virtuous circle of declining income streams. Academics will want evidence – Look at those who build substantial proportion of their income from workshops and even worse, portfolio reviews. Look at the people drawn from the gallery world running the business of photojournalism.

When an inward looking ideology is left with only the weakest/poorest part of their demographic to profit from then all you are going to get is smaller and smaller. Why? The barriers of entry get too high and the protectionist measures taken from the down right unpleasantness of ANY inwardly facing congested industry will only benefit those who are personally forceful (more women, less war photographers in high places please!). This discredits the industry as a whole as most reasonable people turn away and get on with bring up their families and working hard.

Look at the recent scandals from a far. Morel vs AFP vs LF Leroy. A pulitzer prize given to someone allegedly digging up the bodies of children to prove a point photographically. The representations of the disenfranchised of the less fortunate parts of the world being used for the consumption of people within this industry (mistakenly perceived as “audiences/the public” as opposed to “their current audience/the industry”). All of this backed up by the cult of personality.

Going to an opening must be like reading the society pages of Tatler or Vogue and saying “look at what she is wearing” or “who is dating who” when it is announced so-and-so is shooting for “X” or “Y” has used medium format for that project. All with the same level of social elitism.

“Free does not mean giving everything away for nothing; it means creatively pursuing indirect mechanisms and cross subsidy to reap the benefits of the new media economy”.

A good healthy business has this built into its structure already. Print presses was new media in China thousands of years ago. Inventing paper was new media thousands of years ago. Good businesses looks, finds and creates the environment to innovate because to have the humility to stay where they are is to be overtaken by everyone else. I agree with Mr Mayes – this is nothing new at all and as an outsider, I can say that it is going to a brave person who thinks that the solutions are going to come from people trapped inside this cycle of dis-investment.

This industry does not need a new business model. It needs good old fashioned business disciplines and the freedom to be run by creative business people able to find a bunch of photojournalists who want to accept their decisions. It seems to me from the outside, it is the business people who are accountable to the photojournalists. That is economic madness.

Maybe this is why the dependency culture of discretionary aid has hit the industry so badly. Why the structures created to benefit from aid so badly affects its ability to attract external capital. It is because it is unsustainable. Mr Campbell – I would argue that these ideas are nothing new in business, they are very, very, very old indeed.

Most of all, I hope I have got this all wrong and everything is fine in this great industry.Why? look at the subjects you shoot, the nobility of intention and the people you try to give a voice to. I hope I am wrong about what I see sitting from the outside looking in.

In my new article, Failed Business Models of the Past, Eh?, at http://mincov.com/articles/index.php/fullarticle/business_models/ (http://bit.ly/b2TceK), I explain why adoption of new business models has nothing to do with abandonment of the underlying principle that the owner of copyright should be allowed to decide how its content is used. If a business decides to use their property in an inefficient manner, it is perfectly OK to let such a business fail. We should not “save” this business by stealing from it the property that we think it uses inefficiently.