Entries tagged with “photojournalism” from Tools of Change for Publishing

The Barack SlideShow

Peter Brantley
November 8, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (2) | Listen

President-elect Obama has been very vocal about embracing an open government policy, and so far the signs are promising. See, for example, this page linked off Obama's public transition Web site, which lists resources reserved for incoming presidential teams -- it is both interesting and amusing to read texts discussing these essential change-of-governance issues along the lines of "Helping make your transition into government as easy as possible." It's historically rare to get a glimpse of national government continuance aided, as it must inevitably be, by the institutional bureaucracy's production of documents akin to a special issue of Make on "How to be President of the United States."

Equally interesting is the set of images of Barack Obama and his family backstage on election night, and proceeding into his acceptance speech. What's notable is that the images are fairly informal -- and they are on Flickr. This kind of photostream -- not unique in itself -- would previously, a generation ago, have been highly curated, entitled "The new presidential family waits for news," and published the week following in Life or Look magazine. However, the Obama pictures appear less curated (or at least have that air), were published nearly instantly, and do not involve the mediation of traditional media. In fact, whether these are eventually printed or not as official administration photos is secondary, because they are available freely and publicly online.

Without benefit of any mainstream media publicity, the pictures were so popular that they brought down Flickr. Thus, this is an event worthy of notice: an expectation of democratic transparency in a federal government combined with a mere decade plus-old publishing infrastructure jointly craft a community around the globe. In a sense, the limited access of the photographer on that election night make this a callback to the effect of TV in the 1950s, when monolithic media broadcast a culture that was shared and discussed in the conversations of millions. Yet the means of this publication, and the premise of sharing, are profoundly different.

I think there's one other interesting point to note. Up until this presidency, documentation such as the photoshoot routinely went en masse into archives, where it later established the basis for the Presidential Library. However, existing Presidential Libraries such as LBJ's or JFK's are faced with the challenge of reaching back into their collections to digitize materials and make them widely accessible, and they face significant policy, logistical, and funding challenges in doing so. The Obama administration will be publishing a great deal of material outbound -- a digitally native presidency -- at a magnitude far beyond any of its predecessors.

When archives are built incrementally on top of access, instead of access being born of hard labor from accumulated storage, the nature of the archive is transformed. The possibilities for an Obama Presidential Library -- built from today and onwards -- are transformative.

Related Stories:

• Open Source, Community and Audiobooks: Q&A with LibriVox Founder Hugh McGuire
• Maintaining a Web Community is as Hard as Building One
• Sulzberger: "Be of the Internet, Not on the Internet"
• Publishing Lessons from Web 2.0 Expo

Photo Blog Shows Innovation Still Alive in Media Orgs

Mac Slocum
August 6, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Alan Taylor, a Web developer at the Boston Globe, hit the sweet spot between immersive storytelling and simple technology with his photo blog, The Big Picture. Taylor discussed the genesis of the blog with Waxy.org in a June interview. Here's a few notable excerpts relevant to publishers:

I have an advantage in that my main role is as a developer here, so I could build all my own templates, format my own style, and so on. I sort of bulldozed some things through though, like extra width, few ads, and I made it simple internally by doing it mostly on my own, no requests for development time, marketing or promotion.

Taylor's photo selection process combines technology and editorial curation. He selects photos from Web searches, photography sites, and wire services. Then he uses custom scripts to extract meta data and resize images for the blog.

When I find an image I like, I save it to a local folder until I get about 25 or so good ones to choose from. Then I open all 25 in Photoshop, arrange the windows in a horizontal tile and drag them around to get a rough ordering that makes sense. Then I start to edit out images that don't make the cut, run a couple of recorded Photoshop Actions to size the images, and do some hand-cropping if necessary.

On his personal site, Taylor explains the simple ideas that brought The Big Picture together:

When I see quality photography consigned to the archives, or when I see bandwidth readily given up to video streams of dubious quality, or when I see photo galleries that act as ad farms, punishing viewers into a click-click-click experience just to drive page views - those times are the times I'm glad I was able to get this project off the ground (many thanks to my friends within boston.com)

The Big Picture brought in 1.5 million page views in its first 20 days; phenomenal numbers for any upstart blog. More importantly, the site shows how tech skillsets and big media resources (those wire services aren't cheap) can catalyze innovation within a large publishing organization.

Related Stories:

• How Hackers Show it's Not All Bad News at the New York Times
• Photography Up, Photojournalists Down
• Guardian Blazes New Media Trail with paidContent.org Acquisition
• Lessons for Publishers in IDG's Digital Success
• The Media Industry's Perspective Problem

Photography Up, Photojournalists Down

Peter Brantley
July 30, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

In a Columbia Journalism Review essay, Alissa Quart looks at the future of photojournalism, which is not unlike that of journalists now that everyone has a camera in their hands:

While professional photographers are suffering, news photography and photography of all kinds is flourishing. Citizens around the world can cheaply photograph and distribute images of their own countries and cities, places like Dhaka and Freetown. Citizen journalism projects like Rising Voices teach photography in Africa and elsewhere. Local image-makers challenge both the valor and necessity of the American or European photographer shooting in a foreign clime, a model that has a certain amount of voyeuristic baggage, as the critic W. J. T. Mitchell has written -- a dynamic where a "damaged, victimized, and powerless individual" is "taken" by a photographer who is a "relatively privileged observer, often acting as the 'eye of power.' " Instead, we will have amateur photographers -- some lucky people at the right awful place at the right awful time (Nigerians who are at the next explosion of a pipeline, say). And I hope that innately gifted photographers will emerge as well -- a Chinese Kratochvil, a Nigerian Gilles Peress.

Related Stories:

• How Hackers Show it's Not All Bad News at the New York Times
• The Media Industry's Perspective Problem
• Pew Report: "The Changing Newsroom"