“…it is now quite easy to find quality photojournalism without ever picking up a newspaper or magazine. Unfortunately, not nearly as much innovation has taken place to fund these photo stories as has taken place to display them. Aside from obtaining a grant (or taking on a side job), there are very few ways to replace the funding that major news organizations once provided to cover conflict, foreign affairs and investigative stories.” -Tomas van Houtryve

Tomas van Houtryve, whose work we love, has an interesting post about experimenting with alternative funding sources for his photojournalism. Magazine funding has dried up, so he’s using his websites and online services such as PayPal and Flattr to solicit donations as a way to fund his long-term documentary work. Others, such as Molly Landreth, have also had success raising funds with kickstarter. I’ll be interested to see the results.

Update (by ML, 9/14): We just added a Flattr button to this and an older post where we featured van Houtryve’s amazing project from North Korea. As you can see, it is unobstrusive and very easy for bloggers to add the button to posts featuring someone else’s work. An exciting development, can’t wait to see where this may lead.

The Aftermath Project

The Aftermath Project is working on publishing it’s next book, War is Only Half the Story, vol. 3, and the organization needs your help. Each print run costs about USD$20,000. Now, you can buy a print (warning: pdf link) to help fund the publication of the next volume. Prints are available from Ami Vitale, Davide Monteleone, Rodrigo Abd, Saiful Huq Omi, Donald Weber, Asim Rafiqui, Louie Palu, Andrea Bruce, and Sara Terry. The prints aren’t cheap, starting at $400, but they’re beautiful and help support the funding of future long-form journalism. The book is an interesting project, as well. The new volume will feature the work of the 2009 Aftermath project winners and finalists. Sarah Terry, director/founder of Aftermath, describes the book in more detail:

Our annual book is a central part of the Aftermath Project’s mission to help educate the public about the true cost of war and the real price of peace. It is distributed free to a broad audience, including every US senator; journalism and peacebuilding programs; and museum curators around the world. It is also available on our website, www.theaftermathproject.org.

(via Donald Weber)

We’ve mentioned photographer Rob Hornstra and his unorthodox and perhaps revolutionary ideas on funding his book projects before. He is currently working on a project about Sochi, Russia and the run-up to the next Winter Olympics, funding the trips via crowd-sourced donations (see link for more info). He discusses his ideas and methods about funding his own project on the New York Photo Festival’s website, and its a nice thing to hear. Inspiring.

Page from Rob Hornstra and Arnold van Bruggen's promo for The Sochi Project

Changing Ideas - Getting photographers and NGOs together

‘You must also ensure you show the effect of the NGO’s work rather than just the vulnerable members of society and their stories,’ [David Graham] says. ‘Providing such context is extremely important as otherwise you are just picturing misery without suggesting a solution – which in this case is the work of the NGO.’ -Telegraph “Common Goals“

The Telegraph has an interview/feature with David Graham, the photographer behind Changing Ideas, an organization which works with NGOs and photographers to develop communications strategies for the organizations. As we’ve mentioned previously photographers working with NGOs is relatively new and unexplored terrain. As NGOs fill the gap left by news media in funding and using photojournalism, Changing Ideas‘ mission will become more important.

In early 2009, the think tank POLIS together with Oxfam published a report warning that international coverage is likely to decrease under the new public service broadcasting regime being worked out in the U.K. And in 2008, the U.K. tabloid the Daily Mirror said as part of the latest round of job cuts they were abolishing the post of foreign editor altogether. Meanwhile, citizen journalists and NGOs have been rushing to fill the gap. The mainstream media, getting free filmed reports and words, often sees this as a win-win situation. This raises three key issues:

• Do these new entrants to humanitarian reporting mean that we are seeing more diverse stories being told and more diverse voices being heard? Does the fundamental logic of reporting change?
• Are viewers/readers aware of the potential blurring of the lines between aid agencies and the media when NGOs act as reporters?
• How are aid agencies being affected by citizen journalists acting increasingly as watchdogs?

-Glenda Cooper in When lines between NGO and news organization blur

The Nieman Journalism Lab has recently been publishing an intriguing series of articles exploring the relationship between the media, NGOs, and journalists, especially as more and more international and investigative journalism is produced, funded, and distributed initially or in cooperation with NGOs and charities. There’s much to read here, and I’ve only just started, but it’s a necessary conversation to have as news organizations drop foreign and investigative bureaus and turn to advocacy organizations for reporting. Be sure to check out all the articles:

• NGOs as newsmakers: A new series on the evolving news ecosystem
• Kimberly Abbott: Working together, NGOs and journalists can create stronger international reporting
• Simon Cottle and David Nolan: How the media’s codes and rules influence the ways NGOs work
• Natalie Fenton: Has the Internet changed how NGOs work with established media? Not enough
• Saving us from noise that kills: NGOs as news coordinators in a networked public sphere
• Bringing NGO news into the mainstream: The case of OneWorld.net and Yahoo News
• Glenda Cooper: When lines between NGO and news organization blur

This is a touchy subject, because of the moral ambiguities inherent in partnerships between NGOs (which generally advocate particular agendas/causes) and journalists or journalism organizations (which strive for editorial independence and objectivity). In the past few years mainstream NGOs have been producing some stellar work. Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) has been producing strong photography, for instance, and VII recently partnered with the International Committee of the Red Cross for a compelling global documentary effort. A Developing Story chronicles more journalism produced by NGOs. Ultimately, I think the responsibility for journalistically-sound reporting funded by NGOs will rest on the shoulders of the journalists working with the NGOs, who must make sure that their reporting is a truthful representation of the subject being reported according to long-established rules of journalism ethics.

Sheryl Mendez post a long list of fellowships for early- and mid-career journalists over at lightstalkers. The list has a great variety, from country of interest to subject of concentration. You may need to be a member of lightstalkers to see the list. Contact me if you need an invitation to become a member of lightstalkers.

A. C. Thompson’s Nation article about racist vigilante killings during Hurricane Katrina has been on the edges of the news recently, but what I noticed when I first saw the article was the italic type at the top of the page.

A.C. Thompson’s reporting on New Orleans was directed and underwritten by the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute. ProPublica provided additional support, as did the Center for Investigative Reporting and New America Media.

We’ve written here before about the need for funding for in-depth and long-term journalism about what might be unpopular subjects as newspapers are drying up, and I think we’ll see a lot more of these sorts of underwriting disclosure statements. Maybe every article will soon start and end with “portions of this article have been funded by readers like you,” ala the American Public Broadcasting System’s “Viewers Like You”. (And here’s a short wikipedia history of “Viewers Like You”)

And while the portrait for the Nation article doesn’t make me swoon, I’m always curious when I see two names underneath a photo. Chandra McCormick and husband Keith Calhoun have been photographing New Orleans culture for 30 years (NYT slideshow, MSNBC article with video). They’re also fellows at the Open Society Institute (unfortunately, not too many photos there or elsewhere online, it seems). Their house was destroyed during the hurricane, and it was where they ran their photo studio. Much of their photo archive was damaged, but the water transformed the pictures into a visceral record of the damage caused by the storm and floods. This page at Architecture for Humanity suggests that the Calhoun Center for the Arts has been built, and it might be the new L9 Art Center which is mounting the Prospect.1 exhibition right now, featuring McCormick and Calhoun’s work alongside others’. Wish I could see it.

There are some exciting things happening in online journalism at the moment, as highlighted by this New York Times article. Sites such as VoicesofSanDiego.org, MinnPost in the Twin Cities, the St. Louis Beacon, the New Haven Independent in Connecticut, and Crosscut in Seattle, are rising up as sources of independent and original reporting in cities across the US. They have paid staffs, often made up of reporters and editors who’ve been let go from newspapers, and have begun to serve an important role as local government watchdogs and advocates for the citizenry. That role has traditionally been served by city newspapers, of course, but with advertising revenue falling and wire service reporting making up the bulk of many American newspapers, these websites have taken up the slack. Many feature original photography, as well. This is great to see, but I have my doubts that these sites can fully replace the newspapers of yore. Their audiences are small, and much lower revenues online necessitate smaller staffs.

Another possible model is that presented by sites such as Spot.Us. As this New York Times article explains, the site allows people to pitch story ideas and budgets for the completion of the work. Visitors donate money until a goal is reached and the story-pitcher works on the story. Upon completion, if the story is picked up by a big media company, the donations will be refunded; otherwise, the work is released under a Creative Commons license. The site was a recipient of one of those Knight Foundation grants for new media. Without considering why Creative Commons licensing might be a bad idea, the Spot.Us model seems promising. Once again, it’s great to see this sort of innovation for community reporting. A lot of people have noticed Spot.Us, including TechCrunch and Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist. But it’s hard to see how this model would extend to international or long-term investigative reporting, which is orders of magnitude more expensive and more difficult to undertake than investigating why there aren’t more express buses serving downtown San Francisco.

A few organizations have stepped in to provide funding for international and long-term investigative journalism. The Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting and ProPublica are two such entities. But two small organizations (and a handful of grants) are a far cry from numerous newspapers and magazines maintaining large, international staffs in bureaus the world over.

Another danger in these models is that they require some confidence in so-called Long Tail markets and fan-based support. Marginalization and compartmentalization of the news, i.e. if I want to read about the war in Georgia I go to this website, but if I want to read about the Minnesota Senate race I go to this other website, runs the risk of spreading resources too thinly. By relying on individual contributions for newsgathering, split down to a story-by-story level, there’s a strong possibility that we’ll only ever see the news that the crowd wants to see. While that happens now, to an extent, the FoxNews model of crafting reporting to represent a particular perspective will run rampant if viewers and readers set the news budget with their own money. The New York Times model, whereby high-end fashion and travel pieces and advertising provide a budget for reporting well outside those worlds, allows for the investigation and publication of news that some readers might consider uninteresting or unimportant or unpatriotic, but which serve important civil or historical purposes. All of this is to say, it might not be a good idea allowing the wisdom of crowds that push Britney Spears and Paris Hilton news to the forefront (great article at the Atlantic about the paparazzi machine built on Britney Spears) to set the agenda for political, economic, or conflict reporting.

Chris Anderson, editor of Wired, whose ideas have been discussed over at APhotoEditor.com, just today reeled back his theory of Long Tailed Everything. His idea, that the internet provides the possibility to make money and fans in the extreme niches of any particular interest, was predicated on data gathered before mainstream money was being spent on mainstream things by mainstream American on the internet. Now, instead of providing infinite possibilities for making money in even the smallest niches, the internet fuels makes pre-internet superstars even bigger. Brands are consolidating, and the hoped for money and funding at the edges of society and discourse is proving even more difficult to grasp. For all it’s possibilities, Amazon makes its biggest money on Harry Potter and the like, and iTunes sells the usual hits from the Billboard Top 40.

If the news of the future is created through sites like Spot.Us, we might never hear about future genocides or government wiretapping programs.  I don’t want to fall into the trap of looking down on journalism’s consumers, thinking they’re uninterested in Things That Matter, but I also see a value in exposure to reporting that readers and viewers (myself included) might not seek out themselves.

M. Scott Brauer - Inside an artist's painting studio in Shanghai, China.

Thanks to 2point8 I found ArtsVote2008, which aims to collect information about Barack Obama’s and John McCain’s various statements about the arts, funding for the arts, and arts education.  While McCain has yet to issue an official campaign statement about the arts, Obama’s is pretty wide-ranging (PDF).  The candidate’s main positions have been summarized in another document (PDF) which I have included below:

http://www.artsactionfund.org/ - Arts Vote 2008 - Summary of US Presdential candidates' positions on the arts.

In a pitifully small statement released by the McCain campaign, the candidate states his position, worth including here in full:

John McCain believes that arts education can play a vital role fostering creativity and expression. He is a strong believer in empowering local school districts to establish priorities based on the needs of local schools and school districts. Schools receiving federal funds for education must be held accountable for providing a quality education in basic subjects critical to ensuring students are prepared to compete and succeed in the global economy. Where these local priorities allow, he believes investing in arts education can play a role in nurturing the creativity of expression so vital to the health of our cultural life and providing a means of creative expression for young people.”

That sounds fine, but it’s 4 relatively meaningless sentences. Lip service. John McCain opposes the existence of the National Endowment for the Arts. The Salt Lake Tribune has great analysis of the two candidate’s positions.

Obama’s arts policy proposal, on the other hand, was called “the most comprehensive platform on the arts” by Arts Action Fund CEO and president Robert Lynch. It provides for the creation of an Artists Corps (which reminds me of the Farm Security Administration, which begat modern photojournalism), national initiatives for funding and recognizing arts achievement, and widespread arts education based on research in Chicago’s failing schools. More than that, freelancers reading this will be interested to note Obama’s recognition of the impossibility of obtaining health insurance as an independent artist outside of traditional employment, noting that his health care policy would make it easier for artists to afford federal health insurance. And our international audience will be happy to learn that Obama’s platform includes explicit provision for cultural artistic exchange, both through funding American artists’ travel and exhibition internationally and through the streamlining of visa processes in order to make the USA an attractive place for international artists to come and create and exhibit their work.

Via Mary Virginia Swanson’s excellent blog, I learned that it’s currently Funding Month at the Foundation Center, an organization started in 1956 in order to get artists funding through grants.

The organization has offices in New York, Atlanta, Cleveland, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., and so-called Cooperating Collections, which are grant-related resources, in all 50 American states.