‘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…

There have been two prevailing attitudes toward the proposed conference/symposium dealing with issues of race and diversity in photography:

a) That it is absolutely necessary & b) It is a terrifying prospect.

The first point speaks for itself, and the second point becomes clear when one considers the kerfuffles, misunderstanding and (dare I say it) vitriol that has accompanied much online discussion.” -Prison Photography

Following up on earlier talk of a conference on race and photography, Pete Brook has spearheaded the effort to create an online symposium covering the subject, and the momentum is building. A great mix of potential contributors have already responded positively to the idea, and the work behind the scenes is moving quickly. Read about what we have up our sleeves over at Prison Photography. And get involved!

Seamus Murphy and Charles M. Sennott - Life, death and the Taliban

The GlobalPost, a leading purveyor of internet-focused international journalism, has just published the multimedia package “Life, death, and the Taliban.” Featuring the photography of dvafoto favorite Seamus Murphy, the pieces mixes written reporting, video, and still photojournalism in a remarkably comprehensive analysis of the contemporary Taliban. There’s almost too much here to take in, but it’s all worthwhile. While you’re at it, check out Murphy’s “A Darkness Visible,” a website devoted to some of his early coverage of the Taliban.

(via Fresh Air interview with GlobalPost executive editor Charles Sennott)

Lovebryan.com - Image by Sara Lafleur

I can’t believe I haven’t linked to lovebryan.com yet. The brainchild of Bryan Derballa, the site aggregates the work of 8 member photographers and an oscillating contingent of less-frequent contributors. The work presented is all over the place, but mostly it’s raw and creative and unexpected and fun. You might find a mushroom-filled trip to a lake, chickens and naked babies, a trip on a cruise ship, the scene behind the scenes of what looks like a horror music video, a visual-psycho-analysis of one’s kid sister, road trips, or nostalgia for the summer you wish you had last year. It’s hard not to get lost in there for hours.

Photoshelter and Look3 have just announced a call for entries for an online exhibition and projection at the upcoming Festival of the Photograph in Charlottesville. Looks like a great way to sneak your work into the festival if you missed the deadline for Slideluck Potshow or can’t make it to Charlottesville.

There’s a great discussion over at Boing Boing Gadgets on the (dis)connection between Wired’s print magazine and Wired.com. Spurred by a New York Times report that Wired might die,former Wired.com contributor/architect Joel Johnson talks about the difficulties of marrying print content with online content, the separation of the newsrooms, and other goings-on behind the scenes. The comments are where it really gets interesting. Wired contributors Gary Wolf, Steve Silberman, editor-in-chief Chris Anderson, and a few anonymous Wired writers and Wired.com bloggers weigh in on everything from the magazine side’s liquor cabinet to the influence on content and decisions wielded by CondeNast and its proprietary content management system.

The Photographic Dictionary

The photographic dictionary is dedicated to defining words through the literal, figurative, and personal meanings found in each photograph.” -The Photographic Dictionary

to wit: alligator, fascination, mermaid, urine.

I have lived in a world without print media, and it is horrible. Until a couple of weeks ago, when I found a source for cheap issues of Newsweek International in Nanjing, my news diet has been entirely digital. Armed with Newsweek, and a shipment of magazines (Time, the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, New Yorker, among others) from a visiting friend made me realize again how much the switch to digital reading has affected news consumption. If my experience is any indication of the future of newspapers and magazines, I’m frightened for our collective sanity and eyes. Readability has saved my life, or at least, made reading online a lot less awful. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still bad, but the news has once again become…well…readable.

I’ve been reading the news online for most of the time that I’ve been aware of the news. In fact, I don’t think I really remember a time when I’ve read the news when most news wasn’t available online, generally for free. The change from print to digital has ruined my reading habits. First, without a ready supply of print media, I’m without the news over breakfast, in the subway or bus, waiting in a doctor’s office, in a park, during a lull between assignments, nodding off at bedtime…. A raggedy looking, folded up periodical has been a constant companion. Moving to China a couple years ago, though, all but eliminated print journalism from my life.

On the screen, I can’t concentrate on an article for more than a few minutes (a new email has come in, or maybe there’s just one more picture that needs to be toned…). Long form articles spread over multiple pages are annoying at best. More than that, I sit looking at a screen plenty already during the day, and would rather relax while reading than hunch staring at a bright monitor. The Kindle might solve this problem a little, but have you seen how awful the New York Times looks on a Kindle?

And let’s not forget about how completely unreadable most major media sites actually are. With ads, blurbs, top right and left navigation bars, and the like, it can be hard to find the content, especially when reading the local newspaper sites. While some sites provide a no-frills printable version of articles, not all media give the option. Enter Readability, a customizable bookmarklet that automatically eliminates page cruft and resizes the page to a custom width, type size, and typeface. I think I’m in love. Put the bookmarklet in your toolbar and click on it when you’re on an unreadable page. More often than not, you’ll get a perfect-sized column of easily readable text that is exactly the article you want to read and nothing more. Photography included in the article will be interspersed throughout the text, though captions sometimes end up looking like part of the next. It isn’t perfect, but it’s a far sight better than every newspaper and magazine website currently on the internet.

Another great option that I used to use is the Multi-Column Articles greasemonkey script (wikipedia explanation of greasemonkey), but I haven’t been impressed with greasemonkey support in Chrome, my new browser of choice. The usefulness of that script, which emulates a newspaper’s multi-column layout, is limited to a dozen or so websites, though most of the big news sites are covered.

Visura Magazine / Issue 2

Print media may be dying a slow death, but I’ve never known a time when magazines and newspapers ran huge edits of photography across multiple pages. Sure I’ve seen the odd spread or two, but those are outliers. My exposure to photography outside of the internet has generally been limited to edits of less than 5 images.

It’s hard to realize, but I think we’re in the middle of a golden age for visual culture. Never has more photography, of such high quality (and, of course, such low quality) been so readily available, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Newspapers and magazines are putting huge–often too huge–edits online, every photographer dead or alive has a portfolio website, blogs like this one or Conscientious or countless others sift through the cruft, and then there are the online magazines.

Visura Magazine, which I had not seen before, has just published their second issue. Where else will you see long pieces by Ed Kashi, Amy Stein, Shelby Lee Adams presented next to one another?

Visura does a lot right: pictures are big, but not too big; edits are long, but tight; diverse range of photographers and photography; great design (though flash and a page layout too wide for my screen are significant drawbacks). There seem to be a million of these online photography magazines popping up, and just as many have gone dormant over the past few years; hard to know which will survive, but it’s great to see a forest starting with so many saplings.

And speaking of the photographers above, be sure to check out “The True Meaning of Pictures: Shelby Lee Adams’ Appalachia”, a documentary exploring the controversy over the photographer’s pictures, Amy Stein’s fantastic series “Domesticated”, now a book, which in my mind is what the world looks like just before the birth of the world described in the Talking Heads’ “(Nothing but) Flowers” (lyrics):

screenshot of Is The Big Picture a bummer today?

One of the most recent Single Serving Sites that I’ve seen is “Is The Big Picture a bummer today?” Click on the link and you’ll get an answer to that question, which is talking about Boston.com’s The Big Picture site. Other notable Single Serving Sites: Barack Obama is Your New Bicycle, Are We At War With Iran?, and Do Websites Need to Look Exactly the Same in Every Browser? (via Waxy.Org’s links)