A complicated mix of politics, media and the freedom of both are colliding again in Venezuela after a national court ruled that “for the next four weeks, no newspaper, magazine or weekly of the country can publish images that are violent, bloody, grotesque, whether about crime or not”. This comes as national legislative elections are to be held in the next month and from reaction to the country’s largest newspaper El Nacional publishing an image of an over-filled morgue on its front page last week. After the ruling on Tuesday the paper published blank images with the word “censored” across their front page in protest.

The Guardian reports that “crime regularly tops Venezuelans’ list of concerns. In the absence of complete official figures, which are no longer published, watchdog groups estimate 16,000 people are murdered every year.” Today’s El Nacional led with the question “do you feel that the national feeling of insecurity is to be mostly blamed on the information transmitted by the media?” and they reported that 88% said “no”, their rebuke to the Government’s assertion that “media opponents were using gutter press tactics to sensationalise crime, sell newspapers and damage the country’s socialist revolution”.

I’m sure this all needs to be considered in the complications of local politics, but it is interesting to me that there is a newspaper publishing such shocking images (in whatever context, especially considering the image seems to have been taken last December) and is taking a bold response to censorship. It also amazes me that the censorship could be so ham-fisted, with claims to protect the “psychic and moral integrity of children and adolescents” yet only be in temporary effect until the elections. We’ll see what comes.

Update (8/20): CNN is reporting “Venezuelan judge says newspapers can print violent pictures”: “A judge has lifted an order banning Venezuelan media from printing violent photographs, an official said on state-owned VTV.” Seems like international pressure from press advocates contributed. (via @foodforyoureyes)

Journalism Warning Labels - Tom Scott

I love these. Tom Scott has been surreptitiously placing homemade warning labels on newspapers where he sees problematic reporting. It’s a great reminder that everything printed in newspapers and magazines should be read with a skeptical mind. The stickers are available in a ready-to-print A4-sized pdf for Europe and a letter-sized pdf for the US.

This is wonderful. A soccer (football) team in Southampton, Englad, has banned local and national news photographers from covering their games in a bid to force the media to buy photos from the club’s own photographer. The Sun responded with an article that did not once mention the name of the team, “Opposition 0 Plymouth 1.” Better still, the Plymouth Herald decided to draw their coverage of the match. Illustrator (and city historian) Chris Robinson drew images of the goals to accompany the article. Brilliant!

(via the Online Photographer)

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.

 

“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)

Alex Garcia, photographer at the Chicago Tribune, contacted us a little while back about his new photoblog at the Chicago Tribune website. I thought it’d be a great opportunity to learn a little about how a major newspaper approaches photography online and how major metro newspaper staffs are starting to use internet publishing in their daily workflow. There’s some good advice in his answers for any of you trying to approach your publication’s management about starting an official photo blog.

dvafoto: How did the photo blog come about? What sort of behind the scenes groundwork did you have to do to get editors and management onboard?

Alex Garcia (AG): Scott [Strazzante] and I had been publishing photo blogs on our own but with the permission of Torry Bruno (the A.M.E for photo). The goal all along was to migrate the blogs to the paper, but the right opportunity hadn’t come along to do so. In the process, we were all able to understand how much work was involved to publish a blog, and what issues we would run into with our commentaries. So we worked close together to avoid any problems. Our readership were friends, family, colleagues, and eager-to-learn photogs, so it was a pretty forgiving crowd. Separately, in order to promote reader engagement, the Tribune decided to form the Trib Nation blog at chicagotribune.com. Its goal is to engage readers in the workings and understandings of the newspaper process. Torry saw that such a blog wouldn’t be complete without photos, which people respond to emotionally. It helped that the Trib Nation blog editor James Janega was a big proponent of photos, and a decent photographer himself. So we formed the Trib Photo Nation photo blog under the umbrella of Trib Nation, with two individual photo blogs, Assignment Chicago (mine) and Shooting from the Hip (Scott’s). Our executive editor Gerry Kern is a big fan of photography, and speaks the language. He and Jane Hirt, managing editor, are both strong proponents, but it’s still a process with many players. So it took some time.

How do you decide what goes on the blog? What’s its goal? Is it a tease for print content, a way to get outtakes into the light of day, a way for you to engage more with your stories in a public way, a place to talk about photography, a place to talk about the process of photojournalism? What do you expect readers to get out of the blog?

AG: I think you pretty much hit on all of those goals. Scott and I both love that now that we are on the Tribune site, we can publish outtakes. Off-brand we couldn’t do that, because there was less copyright protection in case someone swiped a photo. I think the primary goal is reader engagement. You want people, especially Chicagoans, to participate and engage in the product that we put out. In so doing, I think we all benefit – as long as we all remain open-minded about receiving new thoughts and/or criticism. Opening ourselves up to people in an engaging way is not something that photographers typically do. We send in our work and then go home before we pick up the paper or check out the website, etc.. The blog is supposed to be more of a vehicle for social engagement, so it’s not just like an online portfolio or something.

Personally, I like giving my work greater longevity. So much of what I shoot is never seen by anyone, or gone in a minute on the internet. Having a photo blog enables me to shape my vision and thoughts, and to communicate more fully than any other medium. We get into this business to share, and this is a platform to do so if there ever was one. I like to write and to express thoughts through words. Some people don’t and find the prospect daunting.

I hope that people will see through my photo blog that photojournalists are three-dimensional people, not the cartoonish characters that are often imagined or portrayed in entertainment media. I also hope that I can give younger photographers some advice that will be useful – not just strobe advice but perspective on what they want to achieve in their career. There are many routes in photography and photojournalism, and I think people starting out want to know what to expect and what is possible. If you want to dedicate yourself to something in life, you need those answers.

What’s the reader response to the Tribune’s photo blogging efforts?

AG: Very positive. People love the larger photos and the photographer back-stories. I think long-term individual photo blogs will always work better than staff-blogs because readers respond more to the personal connection and the unique take that you get with one photographer’s voice. But it’s a new initiative, two weeks old, so we are just getting out there. I thought we would inherit a lot of traffic, but the reality is that the Tribune has many other bloggers who all want promotion as well. So we are trying to promote ourselves above the din of voices.

How do the Tribune photographers use their blogs? Is there a mandatory blog contribution every week/2weeks/month? Do they run things by you, the blog manager, before posting, or is it a free-for-all? What’s the photographers’ response been to the blogs?

AG: Only 2 photographers have blogs at the moment. Publication frequency is up to us, whatever we feel is enough to keep people coming back without diluting the quality. I’m at four times/week, and Scott is around that too, although he varies himself more – usually publishing more than that, than less. Now that the work is published on the Tribune site, we have to have our postings run by Robin Daughtridge, the director of photography. I’m happy for that. She used to be a copy editor a long time ago, and I trust her judgment. It’s easy as a photographer to not always see the bigger picture of the newspaper and our chain, so she helps with that. I think other photographers would like to blog as well, so depending on how it goes with us that will probably happen. But it will add more workload because that means everyone’s work will have to be vetted.

Now that you’ve got a couple months under the blog’s belt, what have you learned that might be useful to others trying to get a photoblog going at their paper?

AG: Be willing to explore every angle to persuade the editor of the website to get aboard. It shouldn’t be that hard because the facts are on our side as photographers. We are becoming a visual culture and rich media is driving everything now. Even Google is getting smarter about indexing images. Which reminds me. Persuade them that still images and video can form the part of their SEO strategy. Learn how to optimize your images so that your pictures show up in web searches. That will drive more traffic to your company’s website. Or learn about wordpress or typepad so that you can tell them things are possible when they are inclined to believe or say that they aren’t. Our designer said that there wasn’t a good template for photo galleries, and that’s why we hadn’t done a photo blog. At that point, I knew enough about publishing platforms that I said, “Why do we need a photo gallery template for a photo blog? Let’s just make a one-column blog and insert images according to the width of the page.” He hadn’t thought of that, but he knew that I knew what I was talking about. And that’s what we did.

I’ve almost been photo-blogging for a year now, but only a couple weeks at the paper. Individually, I think the most useful thing is to think about how you are going to grow an audience. We don’t have a link on our home page, so if anyone is going to find my photo blog, it’s going to come through my own promotion. And that takes time. You can’t just set up a twitter account and facebook page and expect traffic to grow quickly. Even when you get huge spikes of traffic as I have, you only keep a small percentage of that as recurring readers. You could easily spend three times as much time promoting your photo blog through social media, etc.. as you would actually blogging.

The other thing to consider is, do you shoot the kinds of things that people are going to want to see? I shoot a lot of grief because of my early morning shift, but I’m not posting that to the blog, because if they want to see that, they can go to the main site. People don’t want to be overwhelmed by grief. And promoting that on Twitter would be unseemly at best “check it out. great shot of mom crying”… It might be better to have a photo blog on a theme that is particularly compelling to your readers. I work in a big city, so there are a lot of interesting/crazy/new things happening. People also enjoy photos of the city and its landscape. In a different area, something else than a generalist blog might work better.

How does the blog fit into your normal workday at the paper? 3 posts a week, I see on the about page; planning? budget? design? cost (I know the Big Picture goes through a lot of money for bandwidth; I’d guess you aren’t getting the same sort of traffic, but I’m sure the cost of hosting it/designing it/spending time updating it is something to consider)

AG: I post now 4 times a week, with the fourth day being a Photo Tip Tuesday entry (example). Juggling everything is not easy. I have assignments to get out, images to prep and posts to write. In the back of my mind throughout the week, I’m making a mental note of when I will post which photo, and whether I need to get out and shoot more to repopulate the pipeline. The photo blog is not perceived to be mission critical, so I can’t say to the assignment desk “Oh, I can’t shoot that, I have to work on my photo blog” I don’t think some of the other photographers on staff realize how much it adds to your mental workflow. It probably comes to about 8 hours/week, interspersed between my workday and sometimes off-time. Most of the work is pretty straightforward because of the templates and automation involved. In addition to time of production and promotion, you also spend more time monitoring comments and traffic sources, etc.. It could easily bog you down if you let it. Because Robin is also running a photo staff blog, I know she is aware of the time and difficulty of the endeavor.

I think the costs you mention are minimal. IF it were a video blog that might be different, but I’ve never heard anyone talk about the cost of maintenance as a reason not to do something.

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Be sure to check out Alex Garcia’s portfolio website, blog, facebook page, and twitter.

Slashfilm (possibly taking the story from reddit) details the repeated use of the same prop newspaper across many films and television shows. It’s in Desperate Housewives, No Country For Old Men, Everybody Hates Chris, and countless other productions. As slashfilm notes, it’s like a visual Wilhelm Scream.

(via waxy.org)

“The reason it matters is that because there is no longer a healthy, aggressive press corps–and no David Yepson-type dean of political journalists–candidates don’t run the same kind of gauntlet they once did. They’re not challenged by journalists.” -Joshua Green

Pundits have been offering all sorts of theories to explain the political success of Rand Paul, the radical libertarian/Tea Party candidate who recently won the Republican primary in Kentucky, especially in light of Paul’s recent political pratfalls: attacking the 1964 Civil Rights Act and saying BP is not to blame for the Gulf oil spill. Now the Republican party is trying to wrangle in the unpredictable politician.

David Simon, and others, have suggested that the next decade without newspapers will be a golden age of political corruption. Now, Joshua Green, writing on the Atlantic’s website, thinks layoffs at Kentucky newspapers, especially at the Louisville Courier-Journal, are to blame for Rand Paul’s ascendancy and his inability to handle national media attention (the Civil Rights Act flub happened during a national television interview on MSNBC and Paul became only the 3rd guest in over 60 years to pull out of an appearance on Meet the Press, a nationally-broadcast Sunday morning political news show). Without an agressive local press before the primaries, Green argues, Paul managed to keep voters focused on his message of a balanced budget and government overstepping the Constitution. Now that he faces the scrutiny of the national press corps willing to aggressively question Paul’s talking points, he’s making the sorts of mistakes one would expect to be uncovered by the local media before primary elections.

There is some counterpoint to this position, though, laying blame on the national media from the start. The Courier-Journal did, in fact, publish an editorial on April 25 which said Paul “holds an unacceptable view of civil rights.”

“I am ashamed of you and your management colleagues [at the New York Times]. I still have the highest regard for your editors, writers, and photographers. Your statements have the feel of events in Florida during the last election with lawyers and persons of authority depriving people of what was theirs. You are expending huge amounts of highly paid time to deprive freelance photographers of their property and consequently of income for the minimal amount of profit that will be generated by this mean-spirited policy. It is not acceptable. You use your muscle in words in a court of law because you are lawyers. I will use my muscle in words in the court of public opinion because I am a communicator.” -George Zimbel in a 2001 exchange with a New York Times Co., lawyer

George Zimbel’s website is a treasure trove of vintage photography and stories of the days of photographic yore (check out the blog). Via The Photo Brigade, I see that Zimbel has published a 2001 exchange with a New York Times Company lawyer when trying to reclaim a vintage print that the Times claimed it owned. It’s an interesting look into some of the unexpected and strange legal hoops freelancers sometimes need to jump through.

A photographer who, last April, invoked California State Shield Law protections revealed one photo and his own name by entering and winning an award in the College Photographer of the Year competition. Alex Welsh, whose work we mentioned previously when it won the Gold Medal in Documentary Photography, photographed a murder scene while working on the Hunters Point story which has been widely recognized this year. Police investigating the crime asked Welsh to hand over images of the crime scene, but Welsh refused to do so, citing protections against releasing journalists’ unpublished material and notes. A San Francisco Superior Court judge sided with the photographer, deciding that Shield Laws applied in this case, and kept the photographer’s name withheld from other media and court documents for the photographer’s safety. The photographer, it turns out, had already released his name and at least one of the images in question to the College Photographer of the Year competition. Now, police again are trying to get Welsh’s cooperation in their investigation. The San Francisco Weekly has more.