Instagram as a Platform to Capitalize on the Photo-Journalists’ or Freelancers’ Work
Instagram as a Platform to Capitalize on the Photo-Journalists’ or Freelancers’ Work

Summary/Abstract: As a dominating trend in journalism is the measurement of its success related to social media platforms and their users. Offering the opportunities to get and to deliver real-time photos, Instagram creates a new way to present news stories, and to find new audiences. Thus, Instagram becomes not only a portal and a portfolio of photos, and also a good tool by journalists, freelancers, and photographers. Consequently, this paper follows two specific goals. The first goal aims to collect a big volume of data from Instagram, and to analyze them; the second goal exploits the professional potential of the platform from the photojournalists and freelancers’ perspective, in the context of delivering of visual content. Even though we expected the results of this research to show a great connection between people, the social networks generated on the Instagram, created either by hashtags or by geo-location, are little connected. However, it can be observed that the information flowing between the participants is between the influential persons in the networks and they are photo-journalists. The main conclusion shows that photographers and freelancers use Instagram to capitalize on their work, to be known and to have more appreciations, but also to gain jobs.

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