Alexia Photojournalism Award Deadlines Announced

The Alexia Foundation has announced the deadlines for its 22nd annual photojournalism grant competition.

The professional grant proposals and accompanying photographic portfolio are due January 18, 2011 (5pm ET), and the student deadline is February 1, 2011(5pm ET).

Contest administrator Tom Kennedy says:

"The Alexia Foundation promotes the power of photojournalism to give voice to social injustice, to respect history lest we forget it, and to understand cultural difference as our strength — not our weakness. Through grants and scholarships, The Alexia Foundation supports photographers as agents for change.

"It is not a portfolio competition. The grants are awarded to a photojournalist who can further cultural understanding and world peace by conceiving and writing a concise, focused, and meaningful story proposal, and who can demonstrate the ability to visually execute that story with compelling images...."

LINKS:

Rules (Professional category)

Rules (Student category)

NPPA report

Online Videojournalism Awards Presented

Congrats to all winners of Online Journalism Awards, presented this weekend at a banquet in D.C. by the Online News Association.

Per usual, all the videojournalism winners were showcased at the time of their original publication on KobreGuide to the Web's Best Videojournalism -- the place to catch award-winning work months before contest judges officially acclaim it!

Online Video Journalism, Large Site
The Toronto Star
William and the Windmill

Online Video Journalism, Medium Site
The Las Vegas Sun and the Greenspun Media Group
Bottoming Out

Online Video Journalism, Small Site
Yale Environment 360
Leveling Appalachia: The Legacy of Mountaintop Removal Mining

Online Video Journalism, Student
Knight Center for International Media, School of Communication, University of Miami
My Story, My Goal

The student award went to fourteen University of Miami multimedia graduate students, who teamed with students from seven Knight Center for International Media partner schools in Africa and Asia "to tell stories that attempt to personalize the United Nations Millennium Development Goals."

Working with Tom Kennedy, Knight Center Professional-in-Residence, each team found personal local stories that shed light and insight on critical global issues, including poverty, maternal health, environmental sustainability, universal education, gender equality, HIV AIDS and children's health.

In addition to seven individual mini-documentaries on each of those topics, focusing on seven people from seven African and Asian countries, the project includes a 27-minute documentary, "This is My Goal" (pictured above).

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We previously posted a salute to OJA finalists here (9/29).

To see all the OJA prizewinners in all categories, go here.

Multimedia from 2010 Eddie Adams Workshop

The 22nd annual Eddie Adams Workshop ended this week, and you can see the participants' multimedia assignments here.

Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Adams founded the intensive tuition-free four-day program "to create a forum in which an exchange of ideas, techniques, and philosophies can be shared between established members and newcomers to the world of visual journalism."

One hundred carefully selected students gather in Jeffersonville, New York, where they are given a two-day shooting assignment. Some augment their still photos with audio and video, working in multimedia teams led by industry giants Brian Storm, Tom Kennedy and Rich Beckman.

Nine videos resulted from Barnstorm 2010. Take a look and share your thoughts.

You'll find multimedia assignments from previous years here.

Tom Kennedy's Evolution as a Visual Journalist

Tom Kennedy consults on, speaks about, and trains others in visual journalism. He was managing editor for multimedia at The Washington Post and, before that, director of photography for National Geographic magazine. He has created, directed, and edited visual journalism projects that have earned Pulitzer Prizes, EMMY, Peabody, and Edward R. Murrow awards.

Kennedy is currently the Resident Professional at the University of Miami School of Communication’s Knight Center for International Media. He recently gave a 95-minute talk there on "The Evolution of a Visual Journalist," imparting professional lessons he's learned along his celebrated path.



This semester, Kennedy is "working with visual journalism graduate students to create an innovative website that will evaluate the State of the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals in seven Asian and African cities... His project will become part of the Center’s current anchor project: Our City. As a component of the project, graduate students from the visual journalism program at the University of Miami will work with faculty and students at journalism institutions in Africa and Asia creating local stories about global issues like poverty, environmental sustainability, HIV AIDS, maternal health and primary education."

Video: MSNBC 'Week in Pictures' Celebrates 10th Anniversary

MSNBC celebrates the tenth anniversary of its creation of an entire subgenre of photojournalism, the "Week in Pictures" online slideshow feature, with this behind-the-scenes video, below (6:23).

The concept was originated by former MSNBC multimedia director Brian Storm (now founding president of MediaStorm).

"It wasn't an effort to recap the news," he explains. "It wasn't the week in review. We were much more focused on showing people the diversity of the world we live in."

A decade ago, MSNBC editors picked through only a couple thousand images each week. Today they look at more than 65,000 weekly -- or 3 million per year.

Ten MSNBC editors select 150 finalists each week; then 3 editors (in case of ties) debate which are the best, finding the right balance between tragic and lighthearted.

When online readers were eventually allowed to start voting on their favorites, they consistently cast their ballots in favor of lighter fare. But Brian Storm says that those images only helped heighten the gravitas of the more newsworthy images. Also, the sunnier images hooked viewers, exposing them to darker issue-oriented images that they might not otherwise have searched for.

In this video, Tom Kennedy also weighs in with his experiences building the same feature as former director of multimedia at WashingtonPost.com . The concept is now a popular staple at online publications ranging from the Boston Globe to Time Magazine to Yahoo News.

Naturally, we at KobreGuide champion these pioneering endeavours, as we think of ourselves as their video counterpart -- sifting through large quantities of videojournalism stories from diverse sources each week, so that we can cull an array of the highest-quality gems for your viewing pleasure.



SEE ALSO:

* Week in Pictures Archive

* MSNBC Slideshow - 10 Years of The Week in Pictures (59 images)

Tuition-Free VJ Multimedia Workshop

For those who didn't make the cut for MediaStorm's tuition-free multimedia workshop in New York, now you've got a shot at a similar opportunity on the West Coast: the VJ Multimedia Workshop in Ventura, CA.

Brooks Institute of Photography faculty are offering "a tuition-free multimedia shooting and production workshop for visual storytellers based in the traditions of journalism, for 25 university students and 25 Visual Journalists who were laid off in the past two years."

This workshop is a 24-hour shoot, followed by two post-production workshop days, including a variety of guest speakers. This multimedia project combines photography, video and audio storytelling steeped in the documentary tradition, using the latest technology in visual storytelling.

See detailed schedule here.

Guest lecturers include:

Tom Kennedy is an internationally known visual journalist with 35 years of print and online journalism experience, including positions as Managing Editor for Multimedia at the Washington Post and Director of Photography for the National Geographic Magazine.

Scott Anger is an award-winning journalist, photographer and documentary filmmaker whose work has spanned every medium over the past 25 years. He is currently on a one-year sabbatical from his job as director of video at the Los Angeles Times.

Jim Merithew is the online photo editor for Wired.com.

Grover Sanschagrin is Vice President of Business Development and co-founder of PhotoShelter.

Pauline Lubens has been a staff photographer for the San Jose Mercury News since 2000. She spent the previous 17 years at the Detroit Free Press.

The workshop is July 30 to August 2. Apply here by June 21.

TV Marvels at Newspaper Video

TV is looking over its shoulder as the quality of newspaper-produced video is starting to gain on it, judging from this TVWeek.com report: "Video Gives Print Media New Game: Newspapers Are Still Learning, But Recent Honors Prove They’re Getting the Hang of It."

It smartly points out the essential differences between videos produced by the respective media.

Some excerpts, which cite examples found on KobreGuide.com:

Talk about respect. That’s what the Detroit Free Press got when it won the News and Documentary Emmy for “40 Years of ‘Respect,’” its video news feature on the history of Aretha Franklin’s iconic song and what it means to the people of Detroit.

The piece beat entries from PBS’ “Frontline” and Web sites for The New York Times and The Washington Post in the category of arts, lifestyle and culture.

The win was emblematic of newspapers’ recent emergence as awards contenders, competing on the same prestigious playing field where traditional broadcast news organizations have been competing for decades. Yet most newspapers have been using video on their Web sites for just the past few years.

“We start with the premise that we’re storytellers, with strong visuals and a compelling story to begin with,” said Nancy Andrews, managing editor for digital media at the Free Press . “We had to learn new skills, but we were also students of the craft.”

Like the Free Press, the Washington Post’s Web site is an awards heavyweight, garnering a multitude of national and local Emmy, Edward R. Murrow and Peabody Award wins and nominations in the past few years. But unlike the Detroit newspaper, whose multimedia team is integrated into the newsroom and varies according to editorial needs, the Post’s video output is generated by an online division separate and distinct from the traditional print newsroom.

“We really wanted to create a narrative voice for our video that was different than that on the broadcast nightly news,” said Tom Kennedy, the managing editor for multimedia at WashingtonPost.com , who previously was the photo director of National Geographic .

The site prides itself on pieces that have more in common with independent filmmaking and documentaries than with traditional, reporter-driven broadcast journalism, pieces like its award-winning coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, a look at the causes of childhood obesity, and “Being a Black Man,” a Peabody Award-winning series of videos produced by Ben de la Cruz in 2006.

“We aim for subject-driven narrative, with interactions and dialogue that propel the arc of the narrative and create the throughline of story, and have it told in a natural, fly-on-the-wall way,” Mr. Kennedy said.