Haviv, a founding member of the photo agency VII, says only a handful of magazines and newspapers now send photographers to cover overseas stories. Haviv fears that iconic images that could trigger the public’s conscience are being missed.

“There are eyes missing on major stories,” said Haviv, who has covered most major conflicts over the last 30 years.

Like so many other industries, the Web has had a disorienting and double-edged impact on photography. It has made photography more popular and accessible. It has also, however, undermined photography’s traditional source of funding—print advertising. Some news operations are gradually increasing their online revenues but they have been unable to make up for unprecedented losses in print.

This spring, the Chicago Sun-Times eliminated its entire 28-person photography department. (Last month, under union pressure, it hired back four of them.) As they shifted to Web-only publications, U.S. News and World Report fired its photography staff and Newsweek released its contract photographers. Other magazines, newspapers, and news agencies, including Reuters, have reduced their photography staffs and rates.

Last month, the Pew Research Center found that more news photographers, artists, and videographers have been laid off than any other type of journalist. Nationwide, their numbers decreased by 43 percent, from 6,171 in 2000 to 3,493 in 2012.

Donald R. Winslow, a veteran photographer and editor of News Photographer magazine, the trade publication of the National Press Photographers Association, called those cutbacks a strategic mistake.

“We now live in the most visual, literate society America has ever had,” Winslow told me. “As newspapers took their product to the Web, they failed to realize that they needed to add photographs, not reduce them.”

Posting smartphone self-portraits online has become so ubiquitous that the Oxford English Dictionary declared “selfie” the 2013 word of the year. The buzz—and debate—surrounding the practice reached a crescendo when President Barack Obama posed for Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt’s iPhone self-portrait with British Prime Minister David Cameron at Nelson Mandela’s memorial service.

At the same time, the Obama White House, using social media and an in house-photographer, has created an Orwellian system for distributing sanitized images of the president that excludes photojournalists. The administration prohibits the White House press corps from photographing Obama at work in the Oval Office—a long-accepted practice.

“By no stretch of the imagination are these images journalism,” Santiago Lyon, director of photography at the Associated Press, wrote in a scathing op-ed piece in The New York Times last week. “Rather, they propagate an idealized portrayal of events on Pennsylvania Avenue.”