The big news yesterday was that Yahoo and Reuters are embracing citizen photojournalism in a big way. Today, Dan Gillmor offers a long goodbye for the profession of photojournalism.

How can people who cover breaking news for a living begin to compete? They can’t possibly be everywhere at once. They can compete only on the stories where they are physically present — and, in the immediate future, by being relatively trusted sources.

But the fact remains, there are far more newsworthy situations than pro picture takers. In the past, most of those situations never were captured. Not any longer.

Is it so sad that the professionals will have more trouble making a living this way in coming years? To them, it must be — and I have friends in the business, which makes this painful to write in some ways.

To the rest of us, as long as we get the trustworthy news we need, the trend is more positive.

As for the deal in question, Dan says flat-out: "I’m highly skeptical of business models, typically conceived by Big Media Companies, that tell the rest of us: “You do all the work, and we’ll take all the money we make by exploiting it.” This is not just unethical.. It’s also unsustainable in the long run."

Under the deal, users won't be paid for images appearing on Yahoo and Reuters websites but will be paid if they run in print. Isn't that backwards? Newspapers are rapidly moving operations online. Getting paid for the dying business model is a little funky and it just goes to show that online is still seen as a place where the advertising revenue comes at very little editorial cost.

Nicole Simon notes: "Basically you are giving Reuters a huge amount of material to select from (without them having to pay anything for it) and if you are lucky, your work is taken. Then your work gets used (probably without usable credits) and if it gets reprinted AND it will be reported, first Reuters and Yahoo will receive money.

I am no friend of the old copyright system, I call it outdated and it needs work done. It was invented in the last millenium and could not have forseen the internet. Still, we have to talk about ways to share revenue in a fair way between all parties.

Former journalist and current J-teacher Mark Hamilton argues that Gillmor misses something:

News “shooters” may be ubiquitous, but far fewer will be the citizen photogs willing (or even able) to go in-depth, to string together the compelling series of images, to work the subject to capture the image, or video, that rises above mere showing to telling.

I’m not going to argue that only those shooters with press passes can do this. Evidence abounds on Flickr that there are talented, passionate storytellers out there. So do the best of the videoblogs. I will argue that storytelling takes time and energy and someone has to pay for that.

It’s that type of visual storytelling that I suspect will remain the province of the pros and the dedicated amateurs, even as news, sports, enertainment and even feature photography slowly slides out of the hands of the traditional newsroom.

The fact of the matter, though, is that the bread and butter of the news is news shots. If you're on the scene and can basically point the lens at the action with some semblance of lighting, that's the shot that's needed. Gorgeous, compelling, story-telling photographs are few and far between. We can't live without any photojournalism but as Mark notes, there are some amateurs out there who can compete with the best. For the pros, the market is getting very small.