From Still Photog to Videojournalist

Good profile of a veteran print photojournalist who expanded his skill set to incorporate online video:

Former Newspaper Photographer Becomes Mobile, Social Journalist

By Damon Kiesow (Poynter.org)

"Hi, I'm Jim. I'm from the Internet."

That was the moment Jim MacMillan (pictured), a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist, veteran of 17 years at the Philadelphia Daily News and former embedded journalist of the war in Iraq, realized the game had changed.

He uttered those words two years ago to a fire chief at a scene in Philadelphia while shooting video and still photos for the Daily News website. Pursuing a Web-first strategy was relatively new for the paper. And that was the confusion, said MacMillan.

"If I barked 'Daily News,' it said something about the cultural and social authority [of my presence] and where they could find the pictures the next day," he said. But explaining that he was shooting video for the Web and pulling video stills for print, and that the video could be found online via a series of clicks on the site, lacked the same efficiency and charm. "Trying to boil down the shorthand in the middle of a crisis is really difficult," he said.

MacMillan, who is finishing up a year teaching at the University of Missouri J-school, said that moment was emblematic of his transition from a street photographer covering crime in Philadelphia to a "social media" journalist who at last count had more Twitter followers than Katie Couric.

The epiphany took place in April 2008, some months after MacMillan had returned to the Daily News from a fellowship, after which he taught himself video and Web skills. As the paper's first video journalist, he was working that day with a Sony HD video camera, using still images from the video for the newspaper.

MacMillan shared the despair of many newspaper videographers at the time: The craft was still new enough that few media websites displayed video prominently, which meant a lot of innovative work went unseen. "You couldn't find my content," he said. There were "no distributable media players and no RSS feeds" on the Daily News site to help the videos get shared and discussed around the Web.

As much as he was concerned with distribution, the technology of remote electronic newsgathering was also a challenge. MacMillan was working at the time to fit a TV live truck into a backpack so he could stream video directly to the Web from anywhere in town. In 2007 that required a laptop, digital video camera, wireless modem and a fair amount of luck. Now, of course, the live truck fits in his pocket in the form of an iPhone.

Read the whole story here.

The Next 10 Newspapers to Die?

After careful analysis, 24/7 Wall St. has created a list of the 10 major daily papers that are most likely to fold or shutter their print operations and only publish online.

The parent of the papers in Philadelphia declared bankruptcy as did the Journal Register chain. The Rocky Mountain News closed and the Seattle Post Intelligencer, owned by Hearst, will almost certainly close or only publish online. Hearst has said it will also close The San Francisco Chronicle if it cannot make massive cuts at the paper. The most recent rumor is that the company will fire half of the editorial staff. That action still may not be enough to make the property profitable.

It is possible that eight of the fifty largest daily newspapers in the United States could cease publication in the next eighteen months.

Here's their endangered list:

1. The Philadelphia Daily News
2. The Minneapolis Star Tribune
3. The Miami Herald
4. The Detroit News
5. The Boston Globe
6. The San Francisco Chronicle
7. The Chicago Sun-Times
8. The New York Daily News
9. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram
10. The Cleveland Plain Dealer

Meanwhile, McClatchy announced it is cutting another 1,600 jobs at its 30 daily newspapers, in a cost-cutting spree that has clipped nearly one-third of its work force in less than a year.

The Kansas City Star is lopping 150 jobs. The flagship Sacramento Bee is trimming 128 jobs, and wringing other savings through wage cuts of up to 6 percent and possible unpaid furloughs of one week. Similar job-saving pay cuts are coming up for a vote at two other McClatchy newspapers in California, The Modesto Bee and The Fresno Bee. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram in Texas and The Sun News of Myrtle Beach, S.C. are among the other McClatchy newspapers that have already disclosed their job cuts.