What doors of opportunity are you referring too? Papers are cutting back on staff because they have found a willing pool of photographers that will do this for next to nothing. Why would papers carry a staff when they can have cheap labor?
Why should they? Would you hire two more photographers to do shoots that you and your partner have normally cover? Why would you pay four photographer's salary when you can and have done the same job with two?
Here's a good one and an awakening I had last week. I went to the ATM to make an off-hours deposit of the checks I got for the week. I put my card in like I normally do and notice things have changed since the previous week. No more envelope deposits. OK, no problem I thought. Well, instead of doing one transaction for the total deposit I now have to feed the machine one check at a time. If that isn't bad enough I get prompted between each step. I'm asked "Do I want a receipt with the check image" followed by "Please select which account" you want the deposit to go into. Of course there are a couple more menu layers before I can go onto the next check. Oh, and I just can't hit the selection to go onto the next check. without re-entering my PIN number each time. I forgot to add that I was also asked to confirm if the amount is correct for each transaction before moving on. You get the idea, a transaction that normally took less than two minutes now takes more than five. Plus I had to print off four separate receipts for each check deposit. I felt bad for the people standing in line behind me.
Now you will ask what does an ATM deposit have to do with this topic. Everything. It is cost cutting measures by the bank to shift the workload to the customer. They now can cut staff that would normally open the envelopes and then verify and scan the checks for electronic processing. Now this had me thinking about what we've been discussing here. Is this person now out of a job or is the bank using their resources elsewhere? And on the same parallel, I've been using ATMs since the 80s and the common complaint from bank staff was they were all going to loose their jobs from being replaced by ATMs. I don't think it happened that way. And I'm sure a portion of personal have been repurposed or displaced by technology to streamline operations and cut costs. This is the same with photography.
But realistically, as you have told me many times my opinion doesn't matter. I guess you will figure it out by yourself one day.
