>>4113892Editorial photography nowadays is all about speed. If you can get your photo up 5 minutes earlier, and allow online publishers to post the headline "Messi wins the World Cup" 5 minutes sooner, than you make a ton more money. That's why photogs nowadays use cameras with extremely high data transfer speeds (like the Sony A1). They can take a bunch of pictures of the magic moment, upload them to the cloud, and then let the agency sort through them and sell them. If there don't happen to be any really good pictures, so be it, good photography is hard. People will click on your online post or article a lot more if you have the picture; it doesn't really matter how good the picture is, as long as it depicts what you want to show. Good photos sell newspapers and magazines, not articles on the internet.
The magical thing is that because it's a post on the internet, you can always change the picture to make it better. You can get your article out early while the news is hot, and adjust it later on when it has to compete with other sources. This is the disparity you see between the Physical New York Times and the online version. The physical newspaper has better pictures, and fewer of them, because that's the best way to sell the papers. The online version is riddled with photos under each article, because that's how you attract clicks and gain subscribers. There are different audiences to cater to, and the industry has adjusted its distribution methods to stay alive. Sometimes that means publishing mediocre pictures.
Finally, you can tell the disparity in quality based between the type of work a photographer is generally assigned. Look at someone like Victor Llorente that mostly does editorial portraits and statement pieces. His projects aren't under the pressure of a live event, so he gets a lot more time to work on his photos. That's why he can produce better work and use unique color pallettes. A photojournalist like Marcelo Endelli doesn't have that luxury.
