¶ … Photojournalism and the Tabloid press," suggests that while once tabloid and mainstream media were separated by their subject matter and style, now these styles have become increasingly blurred. So-called mainstream media has adopted the visual storytelling format from the tabloids. Once, the tabloids concerned themselves mainly with telling tales about stars and celebrities in a visual and sensational format, where the visual drew the reader in and the visual image told most of the lurid story. Now, the mainstream media uses visual images in a similar way, even when it is attempting to chronicle a sober matter of national policy. Becker provides first a historical overview of the use of photography in different forms of journalism. She notes, as the news media business changed, the character of photojournalists and thus the character of photojournalism as a profession underwent a profound shift. The era of the purely visual and superfluous study of celebrities came to an end,...

Visual storytelling came to be considered a legitimate subject of study and a profession, rather than merely an aspect of tabloid sensationalism. Visual images were no longer the 'handmaidens' to the text. First in tabloids, the image was more important to the story than the blaring headlines. However, as pictures came to be of better quality, and to tell more than the 'thousand words' of the cliche, mainstream media came to use educated and credited photojournalists more and more, and to value them almost as much as they did their reporters.
There was another profound cultural shift, along with the predominance of the visual media of the tabloids and the demand amongst the photojournalists that their profession is taken seriously by mainstream editors. The nature of the daily newspaper changed as well, in…