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.

Assignment Chicago - Chicago Tribune Photo Blog by Alex Garcia

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.

The same newspaper appears in many different movies and television shows.

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.”

Newspapers are dying for a few reasons. Readers don’t want to pay for yesterday’s news, and advertisers follow them. Your iPhone, your laptop is muc more handy than the New York Times on Sunday. …. It’s enough to bury any industry. So, should we rather ask, “Can anything save newspapers?”…We started to redesign [newspapers]…I wanted to make posters, not newspapers….Design can turn your company upside down.” -Jacek Utko on newspaper design

Recent news in the decline of newspapers and magazines reminded me of the above video of Jacek Utko explaining his successes in reinvigorating European newspapers through design. By radically transforming the visual culture of newspapers in Poland, Estonia, Russia, and elsewhere, the newspapers’ circulations jumped between 30 and 100 percent. In Russia, circulation jumped 29%, in Poland 35%, a Bulgarian newspaper saw a 100% jump in circulation just after a visual redesign.

Tyler Hicks - A Scrapbook From the Tribal Areas - NYT At War Blog

The New York Times’ blogs keep getting better and better. Everyone knows Lens, but perhaps At War isn’t as well known. Formed out of the now defunct Baghdad Bureau blog, At War is “a reported blog from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and other areas of conflict in the post-9/11 era.” There’s always something interesting to read or see, from the above seized pictures from Pakistan’s restive Waziristan to Franco Pagetti’s grandmother’s gnocchi recipe as served to Ashley Gilbertson for a birthday to a translator’s perspective on speaking with a would-be suicide bomber to downtime on patrol with Afghan and American soldiers.

A number of photographers currently contribute or have contributed to the blog (that list isn’t up to date), and the archives are worth a look: Peter Van Agtmael, Tyler Hicks, Christoph Bangert, Michael Kamber, Johann Spanner, Ashley Gilbertson, and Joao Silva

Angry People in Local Newspapers - Comic Relief Pupils Sent Home

ProbablyBadNews.com

I spent a year working for medium-sized community newspapers in the midwestern US. Maybe that’s why I like Angry People in Local Newspapers, Glum Councilors, and Probably Bad News (part of the Cheezburger empire), and Media Relations’ Funny Headlines, so much. Angry People in Local Newspapers especially hits home with me, because it was such a common assignment. Maybe the city wasn’t properly clearing snow, or maybe a nearby business put up some garish new signs; somehow, I was supposed to come out of the assignment with a publishable picture communicating local dissatisfaction with something difficult to photograph (or impossible to photograph, in the case of complaints about noise). Ironically, this Angry Citizen of the Week sort of story is one of the great powers of the local newspaper. Once a problem is made known in such a public way, the problem usually gets solved pretty quickly.

(via Metafilter here and here)

San Francisco Panorama

Q: Why broadsheet?
A: We think that the best chance for newspapers’ survival is to do what the internet can’t: namely, use and explore the large-paper format as thoroughly as possible. To that end, we opted for a huge and luxurious broadsheet–15″ x 22″. Then we unleashed artists and designers to show exactly how much the format can do.” -McSweeney’s FAQ on the one-shot San Francisco Panorama project

McSweeney’s, whose lists you should know, is producing a one-time-only 380-page newspaper to be distributed in San Francisco, to McSweeney’s subscribers, and in bookstores across the US. The teaser pages of the San Francisco Panorama are beautiful, and the list of contributors reads as a who’s who of contemporary American writing, design, illustration. The photography is top notch, too. Can’t wait to see one of these in the flesh.

‘Show of hands, how many of you have bought a newspaper in the last week?’ Usually no one raises their hand.” -Greg Ceo

Greg Ceo likes to survey his students in his Business Practices for Photography class at Savannah College of Art and Design. Usually, in his classes, a couple of students have purchased a newspaper in the last month, and none are subscribers. Great post on his blog about reactions to the survey. (via APhotoEditor)

US newspaper circulation has hit a 70 year low. Here’s a graphic illustration of the past 20 years of major US newspapers’ circulation sizes. The aging “creative class”, who once staffed newsrooms, production departments, and studios, is finding that there’s no work to be had.

Meanwhile, the Christian Science Monitor seems to have found success after switching to a majority-online publication, seeing an increase in paid subscribers.

That doesn’t mean I’m going to like reading online any time soon…

After a recent entry in the neverending debate on the death of journalism and how to save newspapers, Metafilter user fightorflight took a page from an old antispam email forward (which in turn might well be based off of sci-fi writer Robert Heinlein’s solution to fan mail) and developed this standard response letter. A shortened version:

Check as many as apply:

Your [idea] advocates a

	( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) crowd-sourced

approach to saving journalism. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won’t work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws owing to the avaraciousness of modern publishers.)

	( ) It does not provide an income stream to the working
	    journalist
	( ) Nobody will spend eight hours sitting in a dull council
	    meeting to do it
	( ) Users of the web will not put up with it
	( ) Print readers will not put up with it
	( ) Good journalists will not put up with it

[...]

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

	( ) The existence and popularity of the BBC
	( ) The massive tedium of investigative journalism
	( ) Editorial departments small enough to be profitable are too
	    small to do real reporting
	( ) Reluctance of governments and corporations to be held to
	    account by two guys with a blog
	( ) The tiny amounts of money to be made from online ads for
	    small sites

[...]

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

	( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none
	    have ever been shown practical
	( ) Society depends on journalists producing news that few
	    readers are actually all that interested in, quite
	    honestly
	( ) Having a free online "printing press" doesn't turn you
	    into a journalist any more than your laser printer did
	( ) Citizen journalists are almost as good as citizen dentists
	( ) You are Jeff Jarvis

[...]

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

	( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
	( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person
	    for suggesting it.
	( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and
	    burn your house down!

- posted by fightorflight on Metafilter

Read on »