Put Up or Shut Up

As I mentioned in my last post, I had asked for some advice of some fellow photographers on how to approach my new work schedule. I explained I was afraid that I would get burnt out being only one of two photographers and if anyone had suggestions about how to keep that focus that allows one to see the great images, I would be appreciative.

I got some helpful advice, and I got some funny advice (that mostly involved using drugs or booze) and I got some pessimistic advice.

Newspapers for the most part aren’t doing too well right now. They haven’t been able to figure out how to use the internet to make money, especially the kind money they made from advertising sales in the paper. Much of that ad money is now heading to the internet where it isn’t difficult to find places that will allow you to post classified ads for free and do a lot of other types of marketing for free, or nearly so.

Some of the pessimistic advice suggested that it wasn’t worth sticking around the newspaper. The aggravation I would get would outweigh the benefits and gratification I get from being a newspaper photojournalist. Since the other photographer was laid off just last week, everything is still kinda new. Unsure how or if this will be successful.

I tried to be positive in asking my question, I didn’t complain about the situation or say it was unfair. It’s something that happened, and was out of my control. The only thing I can do now is go forward and make the best of it.

The pessimistic advice tended to come from photographers outside of newspapers who don’t think very much of the media. And frankly, there are times I don’t think very much of the media, even being a member of that group. There are those who suggest the formal media’s time has come to an end. With the internet, one can get news from bloggers or citizen journalists. Some good stories and ideas have come from those two groups. There have also been some major ethical issues from ordinary citizens who give a media organization a story, only for the organization to find out that the citizen had a bias or personal agenda.

Even people who are members of an established media organization have bias. One just hopes that a journalist recognizes their biases and can keep them in check. That’s part of the reason that media organizations have several layers of management and fact checking, to balance out one journalist’s possible bias with an editor who looks for stories that aren’t fair and balanced.

A crude but I think effective metaphor is that a good media organization, whether it’s a newspaper, tv program or website, is similar to a good butcher shop. No one wants the whole cow or even a side of beef. You can’t do anything with that for dinner. A good butcher looks for the best side of beef from among many, cuts away the fat and unnecessary parts to present the customer with a nice t-bone steak or prime rib.

Some organizations are butcher shops that only provide at best, a marginal cut of meat. Some organizations do a little bit better job of providing better cuts and more of a variety. A butcher shop has health code rules it has to follow which can be legally enforced. Media organizations only have sets of ethical rules to follow which may or may not be legally enforceable.

Bloggers and citizen journalists have their potential, but many are offering the whole cow. It can be difficult sometimes to determine what portions of what they have to say are worth digesting, and which ones to leave on the plate. And there are some that one should just run away from the table as fast as possible because they’re the equivalent of mad cow disease. Being some web address in the vastness of the net, sometimes a reader has no idea who the blogger is.

One hopes to have a good butcher shop nearby with a lot of choices. A consumer of news hopes to have a good provider nearby, if possible several to provide different points of view.

I honestly don’t see newspapers disappearing. I can’t imagine being left with the only choices being television news or a random blog somewhere. Blogs can be interesting to read, provide some useful information and links to other ideas. I can’t see that being the only place to get one’s news though. Television news seems to be pandering to the lowest common denominator.

One of the reasons I don’t see tv news being a reliable source of news in the future is that most of the time people can’t remember exactly what is they saw on tv. Go to a coffee shop to listen to the conversations of customers, or talk to a friend or relative about some news story they saw on tv.

It often goes something like, “I can’t remember what station it was, but I saw some story about how ABC Company was going to outsource some of their jobs, don’t remember the number, to some country overseas someplace.”

It was the NBC station in Chicago, that did a story about ABC company that was taking jobs over to Thailand for 6 months while they do some restructuring, only to bring the jobs back eventually. Good luck trying to find that story anywhere. It’s like trying to play the game telephone. And even if you do find it in a video format, it’s going to be at the most one minute long. If it’s a printed story on the station’s site, if it has 400 words, that’s a long story.

Now if a newspaper does the story, either in printed form or on the web, you’re probably going to be able to find it. It’s going to quote company officials, have numbers and dates with it, explain the significance of the issue. 400 words for a newspaper almost counts as a brief for many newspapers. For such a story it’s most likely going to be much longer.

I’m not sure what the future is going to bring for photography or newspapers. I know I enjoy getting an assignment and seeing where my creativity takes me. Some of the advice suggested I would be better off going to work in an office 40 hours a week. I can’t see that making me happy though. Some advice suggested I would be better off freelancing full time. The ideal situation of freelancing is that you only take the jobs that interest you, clients don’t argue about the estimate you give them to do the work and they always pay on time.

I’ve done a little bit of freelancing in the past 11 years. I’ve taken a few jobs I’ve not been real crazy about, but they were paying, There were conflicts about the cost of the work. And clients hardly ever pay on time. It’s not to say freelancing is a bad job, it’s just different.

As I mentioned in the last post, things didn’t gel for me right away with my photography. I wish I knew why I didn’t get that great advice when I was in college 14 years ago, or when I started at the Post-Tribune 11 years ago, or 7 years ago when I started at the Tribune. I sometimes wonder if maybe someone said something similar to that advice and I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to hear it. Or maybe I misunderstood them. Or I wasn’t talking to the right people. Whatever the reason, I finally got the advice two years ago.

The advice works for me. Having received it a relatively short time ago, I’m still seeing just what it can do for me. It wasn’t that I wasn’t successful in the 12 years before everything seemed to click, it’s that I wonder how much more successful I could have been. I’ve seen what its done for me the past two years. I’d like to see what else it can do for me before I just decide to bail from newspapers.

Change is the New Black

It's inevitable, even if no pays notice to it. Change is gonna happen.

I've had this post floating around in my head for a few days now. It's a mish-mash of different stuff, some recent, some from the past. This is one of those posts that I always felt like was a reason I didn't start doing a blog earlier. It feels way self-indulgent. If you quit reading halfway thru, don't worry no hurt feelings.

The other staff photographer at the Tribune was laid off last week. Whether it was a result of the economy (that's either truly sinking or only appears that way, depending on who one talks to) or what appears to be some sort of natural contraction of staff in the newspaper market, it's now just my boss and I shooting.

My typical shift prior to this was Monday and Tuesday afternoons, then Wednesday thru Friday the shift depended on the time of the year and what assignments there were day to day. There were weekends thrown in maybe one or two times a month, depending on how many assignments there were and whether it was something I was particularly familiar with or good at.

In the 11 years I've done this I've had people ask me how I deal with the crazy hours and the last minute assignments or schedule changes, even from others in the newsroom, who may have a more set schedule. And to be honest, I don't know how I've done it. It's something you do one day at a time and then it becomes a routine.

This past Saturday was my first of many to work. It was fairly long, but it wasn't too bad. I had asked for some advice of other photographers last week on how to keep looking for those photos that may go unnoticed working a shift like this and how to get that energy to keep doing it. I got some practical advice, I got some funny advice and I got some pessimistic advice.

I don't really know how to judge the situation right now. Sometimes when you're in the middle of the storm it can be hard to judge what direction to go.

I've wanted to be a photojournalist since I was 14 and in high school. As a kid I was in 4-H, frankly it didn't get me all that excited. One of the projects I always did was photography. 4-H pretty much spells out what kind of photo you should make. It would make a nice quaint story to say it was 4-H that inspired me, but it didn't.

I went for a workshop called Hot Shots one summer in Washington DC. There were 50 or so kids for the week and we had professional photographers along with volunteers with an interest in photography that led the groups. Before I left I really didn't have much of an interest in photography, going for a week just seemed like something to do. Leaving after the week was a different story.

Me, making a photo in front of the National Cathedral.
Image copyright Erik Markov 2008

Each day we would go out with 5 or so rolls of slide film and spend time in downtown DC or Georgetown, maybe at one of the monuments. At the end of the day we would drop our film off, it would be processed and we would get the slides back later that evening to edit.

The whole week was pure fun. Spend a week in one of the most photogenic cities in the country, maybe the world, and walk around making photos. The only other student there I remember from that time was Anjeanette Milner, she was pretty cool. Don't know where she disappeared to. Unsure where any of the other students would be now, imagine there are some still shooting, somewhere...

We were exposed to some really inspiring photographers. Tom Kennedy, who at the time was director of photography at National Geographic. Sam Abell, an NG photographer. Jay Maisel, who creates images with some great colors.

The Vietnam Wall and Washington Monument.
Image copyright Erik Markov 2008

At the time, I was fortunate to realize how cool this was, but looking back on it there still is no way to absorb all that was happening. Now I wish I would have kept a journal during that time. I really enjoyed it, it's what was and maybe still is the basis of my wanting to create images. And that sounds really hokey. Can you see the schmaltz? Nonetheless, that week, and the week the following summer got me excited about photography.

It's the 18 years between then and now that sometimes gets a little hazy. When I hear other photographers talk about how they got started shooting, it seems like it involves some manner of they didn't plan on it, they just kinda fell into it. I always felt a little selfish or undeserving maybe, that I always knew this is what I wanted to do. Like it should have been more difficult than it has been.

I messed around some with the school paper in high school. When it was time to decide on college, of course I was going to study photojournalism. Ended up at Ball State for four years. Worked on the newspaper there all four years, had a pretty good time. Was a staff photographer, then a paid chief photographer, then photo editor my senior year.

And looking back on it, that just kinda fell in my lap. I worked hard for it, don't get me wrong. But I saw other people who seemed to be working for similar things just as hard, if not more, and I'm not even positive some of them are still shooting. I knew some people who were good photographers who just got wore out and fed up. Don't know where many of them ended up either.

After graduating in '97 I was fortunate enough to hear from another Ball State grad, Jeff Nicholls, who was working at the Post-Tribune in "da region" (NW Indiana) as Chicagoans call it. I got a position part-time there. Filling in as freelance, sometimes up to 30 or 40 hours a week, was a great first start. I learned a lot, was around some great photographers and contrary to national media reports that Gary isn't fit for anyone, was actually an interesting place to shoot.

In April 2001 I left for the Kokomo Tribune. The tech bubble had just burst and the market was doing lousy (sorta like now) and my hours were going to be cut back. It really was time to leave anyway.

When I started I thought I might be here a year, maybe two. And it's been seven years. I never planned on staying in town that long, but things have a funny way of happening.

The first couple years I spent getting used to working at a smaller paper. I was trying, but something seemed to be missing. It didn't feel like my work was gelling together. In 2003 I was fortunate to get to work on a 6 month story about a man waiting for a lung transplant.

It wasn't until 2006 that it seemed like everything clicked. I spent a weekend in Chicago at a photo workshop. I struggled some to find something that really grabbed me until another photographer there gave me some advice. The advice has kinda propelled me thru the past 2 years. It's the sorta advice that makes you see everything from a new angle. It seems like it's so easy, it makes you wonder why you hadn't ever seen it before.

That brings me back around full circle to this past weekend. Only two photographers at a paper the size of the Kokomo Tribune and a circulation of 22,000 typically might be ok. But we've been asked to do much more over the past few years than just typical daily assignments. We now have multimedia to produce, magazine assignments to shoot. And most jobs now, whether it's an architect or a plumber, have added responsibilities.

What makes it tough is to continue to be creative while fulfilling these responsibilities.

Which is why I'm happy that even tho I worked a lot this Saturday, I managed to find some unique photos.

John Gwillim of Wabash holds his shotgun over his shoulder as

he and other shooters listen to a safety talk before walking to
the target area at Izaak Walton League for the start of
the Sporting Clays Classic.
Image copyright Kokomo Tribune 2008

One of my first assignments was a clay target shoot. I wasn't quite sure whether it was going to have some interesting photos or not, but I was pleased with what I found. I wish I had more time than the two hours I did. Shooting photos and recording audio makes one wonder if doctors have perfected yet that surgery to add a third arm.

I'm not sure what following weekends will bring, I guess I'll just do it a day at a time. I've got some more thoughts on this for my next discussion.