By Donald R. Winslow
McLEAN, VA (Ocotober 26, 2007) - When Mary F. Calvert of The Washington Times took the podium this morning in the auditorium of USA Today's new campus in the foggy woods of suburban Virginia near the nation's capital, the 2007 NPPA Flying Short Course was off to a rainy start. But the wet weather didn't deter those in attendance, and the 50th anniversary of NPPA's premier educational event took off on a three-city tour that includes Chicago on Saturday and San Jose on Sunday.
(Watch some video highlights from the Flying Short Course stop at USA Today's Gannett Auditorium. See photographs from the Flying Short Course faculty on the road here.)
Calvert talked about what she does to stay invigorated. "After a year or so you eventually begin to start covering the same events over and over again, and you can try to top the picture you made the previous year. I keep working at it, to find something new at an event that I've covered before. It's a way of staying inspired. Another way is to have a project going that I can work on between my regular assignments."
She also passed along some story advice that Scott Strazzante of the Chicago Tribune offered last week at the Missouri Workshops: "Come up with your own great ideas before someone gives you their bad ideas to shoot."
"If you don't want to be left behind, you're going to have to engage," freelancer and Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Rick Rickman said. "I'm more excited now than the first time I picked up a still camera. For the first time in the history of our profession, the kids coming out of schools with these new multimedia skills are going to be in the position of teaching us, the people who have been doing it, how to do multimedia. There's a new breed of journalist coming along and they're nipping at our heels."
"I'm 57 years old and five months ago I took the Platypus Workshop to learn how to shoot video, the combination of still photos an video so intrigued me, and I've decided that's where I'm headed. But also being a good business person you have to understand your limitations. The saving grace of what we do is always going to be concentrating on telling good stories. We need to keep pace with a changing industry, but we need to know where we're going and to learn the value of what we do."
Rickman talked about the importance of photojournalists learning how to do business in such a way that they can stay in business. "The problem with photojournalism today is that we don't know how to determine the value of our own work. We've been so good and so passionate about delivering storytelling for so long, and so excited about it, that we've never learned how to figure out the value of what we do."
"I'm a photojournalist. not an artist, not a documentary photographer," Carolyn Cole of the Los Angeles Times said at the beginning of her presentation. "Content is my first priority. It's about witnessing what's going on today, and doing that day after day. I try to make images that combine content with emotion and a moment with light, whether it's a breaking news story for a feature." A multiple winner of the Robert Capa Gold Medal for Courage in Photojournalism and Pulitzer Prizes, Cold said, "As our world grows increasingly divided, it's critical that photojournalists work hard to bridge the gaps of human understanding. I do believe that fear and hate can be transformed into caring and concern. If I can make someone feel something it's the first step of breaking down the walls that divide us."
In addition to her award-winning photographs from Gaza and Lebanon, Cole showed some of her newest work, video projects shot on two recent foreign assignments after she learned multimedia skills last June in Portland at NPPA's Multimedia Summit. "I'm still learning how to do this, I don't know how you're supposed to do it all at the same time, to shoot, when to gather audio, when to shoot video. I don't know. I do know that I'm missing pictures."
Andrew DeVigal, multimedia editor for The New York Times, told the Flying Short Course audience about the fundamental building blocks of multimedia storytelling: still images, and audio. "Audio is the low-hanging fruit of multimedia," DeVigal said. "It's the easiest, cheapest thing you can add on to photographs to start building multimedia slideshows and to learn." DeVigal talked about just how adding audio to still photographs improved the quality of storytelling, and about how the key words for teams producing multimedia stories are "communication" and "collaboration."
"The key is to pick the right story, one that makes the best audio story," DeVigal said. "Ask yourself these questions: Are there strong characters? Is there a strong narrative? Is it artistic? Is there emotion? Are you taking a specific angle to tell the story from, rather than being an overview? Are the subjects 'good talkers'? Sometimes the audio can be the driving force, the spine of the story, that's independent from the images."
DeVigal point out that resources for learning how to do multimedia are available on the Web, including at www.newsu.org.
"Start small!" he said. "And use the ethics with audio that you use in photography. Use only the audio that you gathered during the actual reporting process."
"Time is the essence of shooting compelling photojournalism, and good stories take time," Renée C. Byer of the Sacramento Bee told attendees. "It's all about time. If I didn't have the time to spend on these assignments I wouldn't get these photographs," she said while talking about her Pulitzer Prize-winning essay "A Mother's Journey." The story told the tale of Cyndie French as she cared for her young son, Derek, in his final year of battling cancer. The focus of the story about how little money and support is given to the families of people who are suffering with cancer while billions of dollars are dedicated to research, and the huge economic strain cancer places on families.
"Patience, commitment, and compassion are necessary to do this kind of work. Derek was a sick boy who wanted his mom to fix him, and she couldn't. She had to give up her life to care for him, all the while trying to figure out how she was going to make do, to pay the bills, to makre sure everything else was coming together for the whole family. Her family was put on hold for a year; she had to concentrate on Derek for year." Byer shot 54 times on the story in the course of the year, while still shooting regular assignments.
"The story ran all over the world and took on a life of its own," Byer said. "'A Mother's Journey' got more than 90,000 reader responses," Byer said. "The readers' response shows us that they want more of this kind of journalism, meanwhile we've been kind of blind-sided by multimedia. If we don't do these kinds of stories in newspapers, what are we giving the readers?"
Byer talked about how she works with her daily assignments. "The majority of my assignments, i change, i don't expect reporters to be visual. I start making phone calls and looking for better picture opportunities."
David P. Gilkey of the Detroit Free Press wrapped up the day of national traveling speakers by showing his Emmy Award-winning video documentary "Michigan Marines: Band of Brothers." Gilkey talked about how the paper started the project, followed the Marines through training in California and deployment to Iraq, their lives after they returned from Iraq, and a Marine's funeral back home in Michigan. Several weeks ago "Michigan Marines: Band of Brothers" won a national Emmy Award for broadband documentary video from the 28th annual National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences awards program. The video documentary was published on the Free Press Web site, www.freep.com.
"The learning process for me [for video] didn't come in Iraq, it came on the streets of Detroit," Gilkey said. "It's like learning a foreign language, but instead of learning French you learn FinalCut."
Gilkey is leaving the Detroit Free Press to take a new job at National Public Radio in Washington, DC, to be a video producer.
Speaking about the change to multimedia, Gilkey said, "It used to be when I showed up at an assignment, I was turned on by my eyes. Now when I show up at an assignment, I'm turned on by my ears. With a camera you see your mistakes in the front. With this [video], you see where you failed with the camera in the beginning" when editing. "It's important to try to keep shooting pictures the same way I would with a still camera using the video camera."
Gilkey said he is not torn by his decision to switch to video. "You absolutely have to want to do this. It has empowered me as a storyteller and given me a tremendous amount of freedom. I'm not here to wipe out still photography, but you can pull still photos out of video, but you can't pull video out of stills. This [video] is a piece of the multimedia pie," Gilkey said, "but it won't be the only thing."
During a break between afternoon speakers, National Press Photographers Foundation board members Frank Folwell from USA Today and Michel duCille from The Washington Post presented photojournalist and author John Harrington with a Foundation Medal for Harrington's generous support of NPPF. Harrington recently donated some of the proceeds of his book, "Best Business Practices For Photographers" to the Foundation to help fund student scholarships.
Loyola University Chicago, site of the Chicago stop of the Flying Short Course this year, will have a new School of Communication beginning in the summer of 2008. Loyola's board of trustees approved the formation of the school and it was just announced this month. It will be headquartered on three floors of The Clare at the Water Towers Campus starting in January 2009. The school will offer undergraduate majors in Advertising/Public Relations, Communication, and Journalism. In addition, faculty members will continue their partnership with the College of Arts and Sciences to support its interdisciplinary major in International Film & Media Studies. A search committee for the new school's first dean is being chaired by Jeff Rosen, dean of the School of Continuing and Professional Studies. The School of Communications expects to create additional undergraduate and graduate programs and to have a faculty of approximately 22-25 members within the first three years of operation. One of the key features of the school will be the presence of working professionals in various faculty roles.
NPPA's Flying Short Course is sponsored again this year by Canon and Nikon.
