NPPA's Award-Winning Monthly Contest Photos Go Live On AOL
DURHAM, NC (December 3, 2008) – The award-winning Monthly News Clip Contest photographs from the National Press Photographers Association's long-standing and popular monthly contest will be published on AOL's Pixcetera Web site starting today, NPPA executive director Jim Straight announced.
The inaugural NPPA Pixcetera gallery launched featuring winning photographs from the June 2008 MNCC.
The partnership between AOL and NPPA to feature NPPA's award-winning contest pictures is a joint effort to promote the great photojournalism being created today by NPPA photojournalists from around the world.
"The winning photographs in NPPA's monthly contests have always been outstanding, and we've been looking for new ways, and new places, to promote these winners and to get them noticed," Straight said.
"Not long ago the only place you could see these winning pictures was in NPPA's flagship magazine, News Photographer. Now in addition to some of the winning pictures being in print monthly, all of the month's winners are online digitally on the NPPA Web site (www.nppa.org), and they'll be promoted in NPPA's new electronic weekly newsletter, NPPA Close Up – which also launches today – and now they will also be on AOL's Pixcetera Web site, where they'll reach a global audience of news photography fans on an open Web page that can be viewed by everyone."
"Pixcetera really sprang from a desire to deliver a great photographic experience on the Web," said Gary Hopkins, the director of Pixcetera. “The Web is a visual medium, and photography drives a great deal of interest and engagement, especially in the form of photo galleries.”
In the NPPA Pixcetera galleries starting with the next set of monthly winners, the page displaying each NPPA MNCC winning image will also link back to the member photographers' newspaper or publication Web site, Hopkins said.
"We have thousands of galleries across the vast AOL landscape created by our staff of photo editors. Many of the staff here at AOL are NPPA members. We all share a common passion for photography and presenting visual stories to our consumers. And so Pixcetera was born, a one-stop presentation of all our galleries. No matter what your interest – whether it's news, sports, movies, TV, music, celebrities, nature, even outer space – you're only a click or two away from finding a photo gallery of interest in Pixcetera."
"Photography can be pretty addictive," Hopkins said. Since Pixcetera's launch in June of this year, the photo galleries have generated hundreds of millions of page views with an average of more than 3 million unique visitors a month.
AOL's director of photography Cathaleen Curtiss is part of the driving force behind AOL's understanding of the power of online photography.
"It goes with out saying I have always had a love for news photography and NPPA," Curtiss said today from AOL headquarters in New York City. "Highlighting the great work of NPPA members, and the news organizations they work for, seemed like a perfect fit in Pixcetera. I am very happy and proud of the results from the collaboration of NPPA and Gary Hopkins."
Hopkins said there's more to come in Pixcetera in the months ahead. "There's a focus on really engaging the visitor in a number of interesting and unique ways, and allowing them to take control of the experience as well. Our goal, as we grow Pixcetera, is to provide an outlet to showcase the great work by our peers and to introduce a new generation of readers to the power of photography."
Currently Pixcetera features subjects as diverse as fashion, astronomy, sports, nature, and celebrities. In addition to NPPA's award-winning photographs, the Pixcetera site includes a weekly showcase of the best professional photographs from all categories, including pictures from AOL's content partners such as the Associated Press, Reuters, Getty Images, other major photo providers and individual photographers from around the world.
NPPA's Monthly News Clip Contest is easy to enter (it's digital and online) and it's free for NPPA members. The contest is entered by easily uploading photographs in several different categories, and the judging is done online by professional photojournalists and editors from around the world. Winning photographs from each category from NPPA's 11 Regions are then combined and national monthly winners are picked for each category.
Pixcetera will be displaying the national monthly winners in their AOL gallery. For those interested in seeing all the Regional winners, those galleries are published online on NPPA's Web site.
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