“Five years feels like a long time, and many buildings have been rebuilt and a lot people have returned to the Gulf Coast devastated by Katrina. But many have not come home, and they may never. Some neighborhoods have never looked better; other areas are returning to nature. There, the vegetation grew wild and high after the ruins were bulldozed away.” -Alan Chin, Katrina: the Fifth Anniversary

Alan Chin has a wonderful piece revisiting Hurricane Katrina up at Newsweek just now. The presentation pairs images from the immediate aftermath of the hurricane with a look at how the life has moved on for the city and its people. Definitely worth a look.

TIME Announces New Version Of Magazine Aimed At Adults

Devastating satire.

 

“The Washington Post Co. said Monday it has sold struggling Newsweek magazine, which it has published for half a century, to audio industry pioneer Sidney Harman.” -Washington Post sells Newsweek to stereo mogul, CNN

CNN reports that Newsweek has been sold to an audio industry magnate. The terms of the deal have not been disclosed, but the new owner may be on the hook for financial obligations totaling tens of millions of dollars. Sidney Harman pledges “to continue to produce a lively, compelling and first-rate news magazine, but also an equally dynamic Newsweek.com.” This comes after a Chinese group’s recent failed attempts to buy the magazine.

I’m back in the US and one of my favorite things about the return home is reading long magazine articles. I just found a stash of recent New Yorkers at a thrift store at 25 cents a pop, and I’m in heaven. Others online have been collecting and sharing some of their favorite long reads. Here are a few good resources:

• Longform.org
• The Longreads twitter feed
• NYU’s list of the Top 100 Works of Journalism in the United States in the 20th Century (and this short list of entries on the list available for free online)
• Conor Friedersdorf’s lists of The Best of Journalism from 2009 and 2008.
• JournoCurator’s twitter feed
• Kevin Kelly’s list of The Best Magazine Articles Ever
• Esquire’s own list of its 7 Greatest Stories the magazine has published

Unfortunately, these lists are all pretty limited to American journalism. But armed with those lists, you should have several years worth of reading material. Reading on a screen is never fun, though, and you could probably go broke on the printer ink alone. Nothing beats the printed page, but there are a few tools (Readability, Instapaper, Read It Later) that will make electronic reading less of a pain.

Political cartoonist Mark Fiore produces weekly animations for Newsweek. I’m not sure I’ve ever watched any of his cartoons before, but this one, found via Newsweek’s odd Tumblr blog in turn found at the Nieman Lab, is well worth the price of admission. We’ve talked before about the environmental cost of new digital technology, and this cartoon sums up the issues all too well.

 

“Young journalists who once dreamed of trotting the globe in pursuit of a story are instead shackled to their computers, where they try to eke out a fresh thought or be first to report even the smallest nugget of news — anything that will impress Google algorithms and draw readers their way.” -The New York Times, “In a World of Online News, Burnout Starts Younger“

Newspaper and magazine websites have long been listing their most popular, most read, and most emailed stories in prominent places. Organizations such as Gawker, Bloomberg News, CNET, and others, have tied reporters’ pay, in part, to how many times readers click on their articles. This so-called Pay-Per-View journalism has been heralded as one of the possible saviours of journalism in the internet age, but it’s taking its toll. In a recent New York Times article, the Chicago Tribune’s managing editor was quoted, “You can’t really avoid the fact that page views are increasingly the coin of the realm.” By juking headlines to drive search traffic, guiding coverage toward what is most popular, and endless promotion and “branding” for both media companies and individual journalists (definitely read that link), newspapers and magazines are doing whatever they can to stay relevant and solvent. One side effect, though, is that journalists are burning out younger than ever before. The 24 hour push for clicks, shares, and tweets, is driving young reporters into the ground. “At a paper, your only real stress point is in the evening when you’re actually sitting there on deadline, trying to file,” Jim VandeHei, Politico’s executive editor, told the New York Times. “Now at any point in the day starting at 5 in the morning, there can be that same level of intensity and pressure to get something out.”

(via Slashdot)

Pause in our normal programming for a bit of an update on what I have been up to here in the Balkans. Lots has been going on and it seems like it will be continuing through the summer. And Scott and I have plenty of interesting things planned for dvafoto so keep tuned.

My long-term project about the relocation of Belgrade Roma “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere” is currently featured in Lens Culture magazine. This project was also shortlisted by Anthropographia and was included in the exhibition at the New York Photography Festival and will continue to tour worldwide (a cool picture of the exhibition, snapped by a NY friend, is in the gallery above).

I’ve also published “Chapter Two” of this project on my Photoshelter Archive and included some images in the gallery above, so you can catch up on the project since my last post about the project on dva. I am continuing to photograph this story, following the families of the Gazela camp as they resettle around Serbia following the destruction of their community.

Lastly, thanks to friend Pete Brook at Prison Photography for writing about my work on this project in a post titled The Roma People: Matt Lutton building upon a legacy of wandering photographers.

I also have published on my archive a new gallery of work from Bosnia in an ongoing project called “This Time Tomorrow”. I will be following events in Bosnia closely as political and economic stagnation continues to slowly suffocate the country. Some tectonic shift will and must come to solve one of the world’s most entrenched political crises. Maybe tomorrow, but probably not.

I am currently focused on completing my book about Serbia in the aftermath of the Milosevic decade, titled “Only Unity”. My project was recently announced as one of seven nominees for the POYi Emerging Vision Incentive, a $10,000 grant for an emerging photographer. See some of the work and my (full) proposal at the POYi website. Congrats to the winner of the grant, James Chance and the other nominees.

I am also announcing for the first time publicly the existence of an tumblr sketchbook for this project: onlyunity.tumblr.com. Have a look if you want to follow me feel my way through this work. The latest news is that I’ve finished the first book dummy, which will serve as my university thesis, enabling me to finally graduate this year.

It has been a busy couple of months with a few interesting assignments, taking me from Budapest on a corporate job to a British international school in Belgrade for a UK newspaper. There is much to come this summer, including a trip to a Serbian winery connected to the royal family and projects to be featured in well known online publications. And of course focus on Dvafoto. I look forward to sharing this all soon, and I hope you are enjoying your summer (or winter, if you happen to be south of the equator).

Newsweek’s hard times continue. While stranded in Beijing, I picked up a copy of the China Daily (the country’s state-run English-language daily newspaper) and saw an interesting item about a Chinese investment group’s recent attempt to purchase Newsweek, the latest step in recent Chinese government- and individual-backed attempts to control China’s image across the globe. The only coverage, unfortunately, is China Daily’s report, but hopefully more deals will be forthcoming over the coming days. There is also a translated interview with the managing editor of Southern Weekly who was involved in the bid, as well as comments from the Chinese internet about the deal.

China’s global media strategy is an important topic. Just as Chinese investors have been taking over worldwide brands and real estate, the country now sees an opportunity to use its strong financial position to influence global opinion about the country and its government by investing in foreign media properties. China Radio International has been running spots on American radio stations, and owns a radio station in Galveston, Texas. There’s a 24-hour news channel aimed to compete against Al Jazeera, CNN, and the BBC. Media executives are being flown to China to for so-called “familiarization” tours. The ironically-named CCTV (China Central Television, the state television news apparatus) now broadcasts around the world in five languages. The goal of these efforts, as senior Fulbright scholar David Shambaugh recently put it in the New York Times, is “to try and raise China’s global profile and improve its image abroad.”

The Newsweek bid is one more such effort. As China Daily reports, it was a coalition of Chinese media professionals and private investors who put forth the money to buy the Washington Post Co. publication. The group, which includes the relatively independent Southern Daily Group, has denied any government involvement in the deal. Nevertheless, the move fits into the China’s general media strategy, a naive attempt to change global opinion about the country. China Daily writes:

Xiang said the move is for the world to have a better understanding of China, and for China to know more of the world.

Importantly, the investors and Chinese media watchers see this bid for Newsweek as only a beginning. Again, in the China Daily report: “The move is an encouraging trend for China’s going-out strategy,” said Yu Guoming, vice-president of the journalism school at the Beijing-based Renmin University of China. “The strategy has, for a long time, focused on overseas expansion of Chinese media.”

More reading: China’s Go-Out Strategy, Can China Successfully Build Soft Power Without A Global Internet Strategy?, Five Have Left Newsweek, Staffers Believe More Are To Follow. But, Lo: Another Potential Bidder! (likely unrelated to the Chinese bid news, but indicative of Newsweek’s current situation)

 

Newsweek is up for sale, after two years of staggering losses. After a redesign hoped to reinvigorate the weekly magazine in the era of internet-speed news delivery, the publication saw declining ad rates, declining circulation, fewer pages and pictures in each issue, much less original reporting, and substantial staff cuts. James Fallows, of the Atlantic, has a great perspective of what place Newsweek holds in the news magazine ecosystem and why an Economist- or Atlantic-like strategy won’t work for the magazine.

The current problems faced by the newsmagazines remind me of an item published on the New York Times’ Paper Cuts blog about the founding of Life magazine, ‘The Show-Book of the World’: Henry Luce’s Life Magazine Prospectus. Of particular note in the prospectus is the second section, which addresses the need for thoughtful visual journalism, and it rings even more true today:

Pictures have become a dynamic power in the Fourth Estate of the Twentieth Century. But, although people demand and get pictures in nearly every periodical; although the gravure section of the New York Times is the section most “read” by the distinguished clientele of that journal; although pictures have made FORTUNE famous; and although the superlatively successful Daily News is commonly regarded as a picture paper…

Nevertheless, people are missing relatively more of what the camera can tell than of what the reporter writes. With more or less success they “follow” the news–i.e. the written news. They scarcely realize how fascinating it can be to “follow” pictures–to be for the first time pictorially well-informed.

For this there are many reasons. Pictures are taken haphazardly. Pictures are published haphazardly. Naturally, therefore, they are looked at haphazardly. Cameramen who use their heads as well as their legs are rare. Rarer still are camera editors. Thus, many a newsworthy picture which can be taken is not taken. Thus, too, only a fraction of the best pictures of widest interest are brought to the attention of any one alert U.S. citizen. And almost nowhere is there any attempt to edit pictures into a coherent story–to make an effective mosaic out of the fragmentary documents which pictures, past and present, are.

The mind guided camera can do a far better job of reporting current events than has been done. And, more than that, it can reveal to us far more explicitly the nature of the dynamic social world in which we live.

-Henry Luce, June 1936 ‘The Show-Book of the World‘

Change a few words here and there, mention the ubiquity of photos on the internet, add a bit about the shift of news reporting from facts to opinion, and Luce’s prospectus could easily describe something missing and much-needed in the current mediascape.

Inside Magazine has just launched, and it looks great. Sponsored by SlovakAid and Magna: Children at Risk, the project brings together photography, essays, comics, and other coverage to address a single topic with each issue. The first issue covers poverty with incredible depth. Subscription is, incredibly, free, though you must cover the cost of shipping.

(via Peter Hoffman)