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Up close and in focus: The future of photojournalism?

Over the past five months, I’ve enjoyed working on a wide array of everyday projects as sports producer at The Arizona Republic. But one of my favorite duties is creating “close-up” photo galleries.

Here’s one example from the 2011 Fiesta Bowl, which took place in Glendale, about 15 minutes from where I work (downtown Phoenix).

The format might look familiar to you if you’re a follower of the Boston Globe’s “The Big Picture” photo blog, or of the St. Petersburg Times’ “All Eyes.” Same concept here. I mixed photos from some of the Republic photographers with those of the Associated Press and Getty Images and put them together at 905 pixels strong.

Normal photo galleries on azcentral.com are placed into regular slideshow format, or even in a super slideshow that displays images a little larger and is meant for visualizing stories that run in print. But on rare occasion, for bigger games, we will put a close-up gallery together.

Another one of my close-ups here, this time the 2011 BCS Championship from Glendale. Compare it to the regular slideshow.

Photojournalism falling into a template

If you compare the close-ups with the typical slideshows, you can probably see why I’m a big fan of the former over the other. What makes photojournalism so powerful is that when it’s done right, it brings readers into a story in a way writing can’t. It evokes thoughts and emotions that are impossible to draw through reading and imagination. Photography is the greatest form of nostalgia in journalism.

But taking great photos is half the battle — they also need room to breathe. And many newspaper websites shove them, usually one per story, into a corner. I couldn’t even count how many times I’ve read stories in print with five- or six-column photos that earn every inch, only to see them crammed into a template online. Design is essentially tossed out the window.

Take a look, for example, at this Miami Herald story from the latest Florida Panthers game. Photos are typically reduced to between 300 and 400 pixels wide and thrown into a template spot on the left side of each story. (Even worse, if you expand the slideshow, photos go about 500 or 600 pixels wide, tops. Full screen them!) Unfortunately, this is the same on a lot of sites, and it only gets worse when they try to tell feature stories.

Close-up galleries are one step toward expanding the power of photojournalism. They give photos that chance to breathe and provide the depth necessary to best tell a story.

What I’d love to see is this close-up concept better employed within online stories — for example, a clickable photo gallery embedded inside each article, no fewer than 800 pixels wide, with the option to full-screen the photos. Or even just have larger photos littered throughout the text, much like we see in print packages. If we can do it in print, why can’t we do it online?

But, from what I can gather, we’re in 2011 and we haven’t quite gotten there yet. (However, we can develop supercomputers that can pummel you in Jeopardy.)

Back to “The Big Picture” for a second: I’m particularly intrigued by creator Alan Taylor’s move to The Atlantic, where he will run a similar photo blog, “In Focus.” Taylor plans on bringing user involvement into the mix, something he experimented a little bit with at the Globe with user-generated content. Here’s an interview with Taylor from a couple years ago, if you’re interested in reading more. It’s nice to see someone thinking innovation when it comes to photojournalism because, in my opinion, we’re lagging a little bit.

Just a little bit.

What does the future hold?

Feel free to comment below with your thoughts on close-up galleries and the like. What are your favorite examples of sites getting digital storytelling right or wrong? Do you think close-up galleries are a step toward the future for online photojournalism? I don’t believe there is one right answer, but there are certainly steps we can take to make this sort of storytelling better.

Lastly, a quick shout-out to my former Central Michigan colleague, a good friend of mine and a hell of a photojournalist, Jake May, for the idea behind this post.

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Five goals for Central Michigan Life’s Web site the rest of the semester

As you can probably tell from the sporadic posting on this blog, my life has been, for the most part, Central Michigan Life.

We’re in the middle of Week 4 of the semester – football season is under way, our first CMU Board of Trustees meeting is Thursday and the archives from as far back as 1999, thanks to CoPress, are coming to the new Web site. Things are going well for the most part, despite a few hiccups here and there. But that’s all expected.

I did get a chance to outline five goals I have for CM Life, particularly in its Web presence, that I’d like to accomplish by the end of my first term as editor in chief, which ends in December. (Not the only goals we have, just some of the more prominent ones) Whether all of these come through remains to be seen. But it all goes back to what I’ve been pushing since the beginning — interaction. Engagement. Collaborating.

1) Building a Facebook following and taking advantage of it

In mid-August, our Facebook page had approximately 115 fans and was used primarily as a news feed for our Facebook followers. One month later, we are up to 463 and counting. It’s time to do more with that audience and get even more people to become fans.

Starting Friday or early next week, CM Life is going to promote its Facebook page on a much larger scale in the print edition and on Twitter.

And, in addition to posting some of our featured stories on Facebook, we are going to start discussions on AT LEAST Monday, Wednesday and Friday, covering the issues and topics on campus people care about. For example, what people think about the CMU presidential search? How will the football team fare this year? Would you want concealed weapons on campus?

We also allow fans to post on the wall, share their photos and post links. These are things we have to promote, as well, since most do not know about those features. After all, if you’re going to give your fans the opportunity to do things like that, you have to let them know.

2) Start bi-weekly CoverItLive discussions featuring public officials and/or student representatives

We’ve already started working with CoverItLive in covering CMU football games. Now my hope is to take it to the News side, where we can encourage students to come in, voice their issues, concerns, etc. and allow public officials, administrators, and student representatives to join in and listen. We also want to give students a chance to voice their comments, suggestions, etc. to CM Life.

But back to the CMU side of things… a bit of background: CMU, from my perspective, has been extremely lacking in open forums with administrators to discuss how to improve campus. A few years ago, our University President, Michael Rao (who is now gone to VCU), hosted forums at least twice per semester where he would field questions from students. Two years ago, that stopped, because the administration said there was too small of a turnout, and we haven’t seen much since.

A couple weeks ago, the CM Life Editorial Board met with the Student Government Association President (Jason Nichol) and Vice President (Brittany Mouzourakis) to discuss ways we can work with SGA. Doing CoverItLive chats was one thing I mentioned to them. Students can’t always make it out to meetings and forums. But they can easily log on to a computer, on to CM Life and join a discussion that way. It’s not in person, but it’s convenient, and we’re entering an era of convenience. If you make it easy, students will attend.

3) Build a “Hot Topics” area with pages centralizing the biggest campus issues.

This one may take a little longer to complete, depending on the time I have.

But in my opinion, it’s needed. Sometimes you can’t search for every story concerning a big campus issue by searching for a key term or looking for tags.

So let’s make it easy.

Our two biggest issues: The approved Medical School opening in 2-3 years, and the search for a new University President. Those will be our first two “Hot Topics” (tentative name). Another one we might do deals with the CMU operating budget. But we’re still working on starting that series.

We’re going to create pages for these issues that feature every story in chronological order, newest at the top, plus any multimedia and links we have concerning those issues. The list, which will look a bit similar to The Spokesman-Review’s “Quick Links,” will go below the second navigational bar on our Web site. The Mustang Daily, the student newspaper at Cal Poly, also does this.

This way, if you are coming to our site looking for medical school news, or presidential news, everything is one click away. And we’ll continue building other pages, perhaps one for football, that will centralize content as well.

4) Build a community photography site, allowing users to upload their pictures and review others.

Let’s consider this an extra credit project. This would be, by far, the biggest undertaking of the five I have here. But, if built right, we would have a gem of a sister site.

We are looking at building a sister Web site to CM Life with a simple premise: Users submitting their photos of around CMU and Mount Pleasant and rating others with “Thumbs Up” or “Thumbs Down” and leaving their comments. After every year, we could publish a book with a compilation of the top-voted photography and sell it. Anybody could partake in this – professional photographers in the area to people with no photo experience shooting with their iPhones.

In essence, we want to create something similar to Capture Cincinnati. Images are powerful and, giving everyone the opportunity to show off what life in their perspective is like, and what they conceive as the definition of Mount Pleasant, is paramount. Sure, we are a smaller market than Cincinnati, by far, but getting a few dozen people to partake in this would be a start.

For now, people can share photos on Facebook, but it is nowhere near as extensive and as interactive as it can be. We’re looking at building this site by the end of the spring semester, if not much sooner.

5) Get the entire staff involved online.

Here’s the one goal different from the rest, in the sense that it deals with the management part of being Editor in Chief. CM Life has no set Web Editor; I oversee the Web operation while the respective departments post stories, multimedia, photos, etc., along with doing all the tagging, linking and embedding.

Why? To give everybody Web experience. To give everyone an idea of how our Web product is different from our print product and how we can take advantage of it together.

The goal from here? Simply keep going. I stress my editors to use Twitter as much as possible, and to get involved on Facebook as well, particularly on our fan page. We’re also teaching reporters the core basics of writing for the Web, and including links with every story. We’ve also recently started embedding YouTube videos when the time calls for it. I also plan on getting everyone involved with the other four goals, as well.

Now that the new Web site is up and the resources are there, it’s time to take the next step and create the optimal news experience for today.

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A beautiful, sunny day in Grand Haven, Michigan

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Having been born and raised in Saginaw, on the eastern side of Michigan, I have not had the chance to experience much of what West Michigan has to offer until this summer. It is pretty safe to say I was missing out on some of Michigan’s finer places.

A summer day in Grand Haven today – an impromptu visit by Press reporting intern Nick Persons and I – is, thus far, one of my highlights. It was my first time there, a harbor town on Lake Michigan. And we didn’t even stay that long. We drove through town a little bit and spent 2-3 hours on the beach. But I got to meet some cool people, soak in some rays and take a nice dip into Lake Michigan.

Quick facts about Grand Haven: It’s a town of about 11,000 in Ottawa County, about 25 miles west of Grand Rapids and at the mouth of the Grand River (which crosses right through Grand Rapids). Two of my Central Michigan Life coworkers – Jake May and Jessica Scott – either lived or grew up there and both recommended at least one visit during my stay nearby. It has a huge beach on Lake Michigan that was quite crowded today. I figured it was a great way to meet a few people and take some nice photos.

Two people I met were Greg and Carrie – a couple from Minnesota – who were flying kites on the beach. Carrie told me they were visiting, in part, to check out other kites and materials, having also been to Mackinac Island and, if I remember correctly, Ludington. (Not sure if they went to those places on this trip or before that) They got one kite up a good 75-100 feet in the air (the one pictured above) and eventually sent two others into the sky later in the afternoon.

Later on, I got to meet two other families near the water, with their kids digging holes, making sand castles and burying themselves. One parent turned a girl into a sand mermaid and a boy into a crab. (See more photos on my photography page.) It was one of those moments in which I missed being a kid. I remember burying myself all the time in sand at the beach, whether it was in Michigan while camping or at Florida near St. Petersburg, where my aunt resides. I was never too much into sand castles – only digging holes and burying myself. At least that is what I remember.

Overall, though, I decided a return trip, possibly next weekend, was in order. I also may check out Holland and Saugatuck, both of which are south of Grand Haven and also on Lake Michigan. From proofreading Grand Rapids Press stories on events and entertainment, it seems like a lot goes on on the waterfront. I better make my last four weeks here worth the stay!

Be sure to check the photography section for the photos I added from today’s trip. Offer any comments or suggestions, if you would like! Photography is something I am trying to get a little better at and could use the criticism.

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“The shot that got away” – why, as primarily a writer, I now truly respect a photojournalist’s job

Photography always has been an essential part of a newspaper. The main photo on a front page usually is the first thing you see when you pass a news stand. Photos give pages personality. They accent the reporting.

But in working in newsrooms the last four years or so, I’ve learned that many times, the photo staff at a newspaper is misunderstood, particularly by writers and editors. Sometimes, people on the writing side of things think they know what makes a good photo to complement their stories when, in fact, they do not have a clue. They also tend to think being a photographer is easy. That anybody could do it. Even them.

I would like to say I never fell into that category of people. But I never truly understood the challenges of being a photographer until I bought my digital SLR camera and started using it. The biggest difference between writing a story of an event and shooting an event is this: You are given ample time to “capture a moment” with your writing once you witness it. You can rewind a particular situation in your brain and try to put it down in words. As a photographer, you have only one chance to capture that moment. You have be in the right spot. You have to anticipate it. You have to be one step ahead. And when that moment passes, it’s done. If you snapped the photo a second too late, someone got in your way, or your camera’ focus is off your subject, too bad. It’s gone.

Exhibit No. 1: My trip to the University of Georgia to cover the CMU football team’s game there last September. I spent two quarters (1st and 3rd) at my computer in the press box, gathering statistics for my story and writing blog entries. I spent the other two on the field. I bought my 70-200mm lens just a day before so I could use it during the game.

While I’d like to think I got some decent photos for being one month into my photography experience, there was one moment that truly got away from me. Late in the third quarter, Georgia running back Knowshon Moreno was busting a large first-down run when, suddenly, he hurdled CMU defensive back Vince Agnew. This was a photo opportunity begging for dominant play. It perfecty captured the 56-17 blowout win for Georgia. Luckily for me, I was shooting on that play, on the sideline. Unluckily for me, somebody was in the way (see the first picture).

Immediately after the play happened, I opened my viewer on my camera and went through my last take, hoping I caught it. No dice. The second picture (down a little, to the left) was the frame I caught immediately after the first. That photo wasn’t in focus, either, but notice the excitement in the background. I like the photo in that sense, and still show it to people, but it’s basically a reminder that I missed “the shot.”

The worst part was I spent a good portion of the game, at least when it was on the north side of the field, behind the end zone with many of the other photographers. Had I been there during this play, I probably would have caught the moment uninterrupted. Defensive back Taylor Bradley (#5 in the first photo) would not have been in the way. One of those end zone shots ran dominant in Monday’s Central Michigan Life, from a photographer for Georgia’s campus newspaper, The Red & Black. Although one of my shots (included in today’s portfolio update) ran secondary, I was not happy at all with missing the hurdle.

These are lessons you quickly learn when you are a writer trying out photography. As a writer, I had plenty of time to put Moreno’s hurdle into perspective and detail for Saturday’s recap story and Monday’s perspective piece, despite not seeing the entire play in person. As a photographer, I wasn’t in the right spot. I missed the moment and that was it. No rewinds. No second chances. I blew it.

Moments like those were humbling. While the writing aspect of journalism still is a challenge, and sometimes a more competitive one, there are many times where photojournalists have a much more difficult job. I can only imagine the extreme amount of pressure they are under during the 4th quarter of a Super Bowl. Or the 9th inning in Game 7 of the World Series. Could you imagine missing that one shot that defined the game?

If you are a writer/editor in a newsroom, take this lesson for what it’s worth. And do not just assume you know what makes for the perfect photo for a story. Respect photojournalists enough for them to capture it themselves. Their job, while often overlooked in the journalism industry, is just as important as yours. And it is quite a challenge of its own.

Be sure to check the latest update: I added photos from that CMU/Georgia game. One of my first real shoots as a novice photographer.

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