ASMP NorCal Presents 'Photojournalism Today'

Please join me and four accomplished photojournalists on Tuesday, March 13 in San Francisco for a panel discussion about the challenges of working in the news media today.

Hosted by the Northern California chapter of the American Society of Media Photographers, the "Photojournalism Today" panel includes:

Noah Berger, a freelancer who has spent the past 17 years covering Bay Area news for editorial, corporate, and government clients. On the news side, Berger works principally for the Associated Press, San Francisco Chronicle, Bloomberg News and the New York Times. He also covers transportation/development issues for state agencies and health care for the Blue Shield Foundation and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).

Mike Kepka (pictured), a San Francisco Chronicle staff photographer since 1999. Five years ago, he started producing his own photo/multimedia column for the Chronicle called The City Exposed, which celebrates San Francisco’s quirky collection of characters. In the past year he has transformed his column into a venue for new forms of multimedia techniques that continue to follow a true “one-man-band” style of reporting and production. You can follow Kepka’s work at www.Sfgate.com/cityexposed and vimeo.com/sfchronicle and on Twitter at @thecityexposed.

Jane Tyska, a photo and videojournalist at the Oakland Tribune/Bay Area News Group. Tyska spent a month in Nepal and Bhutan in 2010, following a Bhutanese refugee family from a camp in eastern Nepal to their new home in Oakland, and continued to document them until the birth of their first baby. Tyska also documented the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti and a local contractor’s efforts to help rebuild. She has won a national award for the Bhutan project from the South Asian Journalists Association and a YIPPA international press photo award for her Haiti work. Tyska has also received recent awards from the California Newspapers Publishers Association and the East Bay and Peninsula Press Clubs.

Judy Walgren, the Director of Photography at the San Francisco Chronicle for just over one year. She faces daily challenges involving a depleted budget and fewer photojournalists to shoot the increasing number of Chronicle iPad app assignments, which require panoramas, galleries, and multimedia. Before coming to the Chronicle, Walgren was staff photographer at the Denver Post, the Rocky Mountain News and the Dallas Morning News, where she was part of a team that received the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting on violent human rights abuses against women worldwide. She has been awarded the Barbara Jordan Award for reporting on people with disabilities, the Sidney Hillman Award, and multiple Harry Chapin World Hunger Awards, in addition to other honors.


I'll be debuting segments of my new documentary feature, "Deadline Every Second: On Assignment with 12 AP Photojournalists."

Price:

ASMP NorCal members:     5.00

Affiliates, students            10.00

Non-members                  15.00

Pizza and drinks will be available with the purchase of a $5 food ticket.

Time:
6-7 pm Social hour with pizza and drink
7-9:30 pm Panel discussion

Location:
Left Space Studios
2055 Bryant Street
San Francisco, CA 94110

 http://www.leftspace.com/   

New iPhone App Makes You a CNN iReporter

You can already get iPhone apps that deliver the New York Times, USA Today and NPR. Now CNN has joined the mobile news fraternity, with a $1.99 app that delivers not just text but also live streaming video and video on demand.

Most signficantly, the CNN app makes potential "citizen videojournalists" out of the 50 million users of Apple's iPhone 3Gs and iPod Touch, which are already equipped with vidcams.

Now all that amateur video can be instantly uploaded with a touch of a button to CNN's iReport site, which has already received a half-million photos and video in its first two years of operation. (Only clips used on TV are verified by CNN staffers.)

Right now the site is awash in footage of the American Samoa tsunami.

The San Francisco Chronicle's "Tech Chronicles" is impressed. Mashable loves it. Grab the app here.

Air Guitar Contest: Time.com vs. SFGate.com

Yes, there really are competitions for air guitarists. On KobreGuide, we proudly feature a short video profile, "Air Guitar Champ," by San Francisco Chronicle's Mike Kepka. Go watch -- it's hilarious.

When we lecture to classes about what makes videojournalism a distinctive medium, we often point to the visual virtues of Kepka's creative approach as an example of something you would not see on TV. And then we'll ask the class to imagine what a more conventional TV approach might look like and sound like. What elements would it contain?

Well, wonder no more. Every bit as good, in its own way, is Garland McLaurin's new 6-minute video from Time.com : "The U.S. Champions of Air Guitar." Its polished narration, on-camera interviews, and use of event B-roll are all unquestionably high quality. Though both stories share a theme, SFGate focuses on one individual, whereas Time pulls back the camera and introduces us to several participants. And without a doubt, Time's is certainly more traditionally TV-inspired and information-laden than what Kepka shows us on SFGate.com. But some might argue that Kepka's quirky style makes his subject more memorable and, in its own way, provides the more emotionally enriching experience.

Both pieces are worthy of your attention, so please go take a look and let us know which you prefer -- and why.

California Shield Law Covers Student Photog

According to an NPPA report: "A San Francisco State University photojournalism student who was at the scene of a neighborhood street killing does not have to surrender his photographs to police, a judge ruled last week, because the student was working as a journalist in the eyes of the state's shield law."

It's a complicated case:

Police were ordered to return evidence they had seized from the student's apartment after the 22-year-old SFSU student refused to talk to police about what he'd seen on April 17 when a 21-year-old man was shot and killed during a dice game. The photojournalist refused to answer police questions at the scene, according to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, so police obtained a search warrant to get the photographer's DNA and to search his apartment.

The student has not been identified by name, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, because he fears for his own safety.

Police response to the judge's ruling was crass, at best. "We're just going to try to find another angle - we're just going to find some witnesses who aren't cowards, like this student is, hiding behind the shield law," police Lt. Mike Stasko of the police homicide detail told the Chronicle. There have been no arrests made in the killing of Norris Bennett, the shooting victim.

Superior Court Judge Tomar Mason ruled that the California law that protects journalists allows them to keep sources confidential and to withhold unpublished information from law enforcement. Mason ordered police return the photographer's item to him and quashed the search warrant, ruling that the fact that the student was acting as a journalist at the time was "uncontroverted."

The student's attorney, Michael Ng, said his client had been working on a project on the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood when the incident occurred, and that the photojournalist had been trying to shop the essay around to papers such as the Wall Street Journal and the Bay Area News Group chain of dailies.

Read Wired Magazine's in-depth report, with enlightening background info on previous shield law rulings.

Full disclosure: This is my student. He truly does not want his name used because he fears that the killer will come after him, plain and simple. To be honest, I am not sure how I feel about the shield-law principle in this instance... but I am happy for my student.

Class of '09: Welcome to a Dying Industry

Barbara Ehrenreich, bestselling author of "This Land is Their Land: Reports From a Divided Nation" and "Nickled and Dimed," delivered this year's commencement address to the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

An excerpt, as reprinted in the San Franciso Chronicle:

(Journalists) are not part of an elite. We are part of the working class, which is exactly how journalists have seen themselves through most of American history - as working stiffs. We can be underpaid, we can be jerked around, we can be laid off arbitrarily - just like any autoworker or mechanic or hotel housekeeper or flight attendant.

But there is this difference: A laid-off autoworker doesn't go into his or her garage and assemble cars by hand. But we - journalists - we can't stop doing what we do.

As long as there is a story to be told, an injustice to be exposed, a mystery to be solved, we will find a way to do it. A recession won't stop us. A dying industry won't stop us. Even poverty won't stop us because we are all on a mission here. That's the meaning of your journalism degree. Do not consider it a certificate promising some sort of entitlement. Consider it a license to fight.

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.

Goodbye, Rocky Mountain News

E.W. Scripps Co. closed the Rocky Mountain News yesterday, another newspaper casualty of our perilous economy and the migration of readers to the Internet, leaving Denver another one-newspaper city with the Denver Post.

KobreGuide offers condolences to the staff, and the city it served so well, as evidenced by the Rocky Mountain News video stories we proudly featured.

Now we're bracing ourselves because the Hearst Corp. is threatening to shutter our hometown paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, another popular and meritorious KobreGuide channel. Where will it all end?

Top 15 Newspaper Websites: More Readers

The Nielsen web ratings for 2008 are in, and here are the most visited U.S. newspaper sites, as analyzed by Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab. (Note that the top-rated New York Times still has about half the visitors of non-newspaper news sites such as MSNBC, Yahoo! News, and CNN, according to Editor & Publisher.)

Here's the good news. Newspapers may be dying financially, but the number of people reading them online is increasing dramatically. (Click on image at right to zoom in.)

1. The New York Times
19,503,667 average monthly uniques
Increase of 33% from 2007

2. USA Today
10,845,000 average monthly uniques
Increase of 12% from 2007

3. The Washington Post
10,260,167 average monthly uniques
Increase of 19% from 2007

4. The Los Angeles Times
7,886,250 average monthly uniques
Increase of 54% from 2007

5. The Wall Street Journal
7,169,333 average monthly uniques
Increase of 60% from 2007

6. The Boston Globe
5,211,083 average monthly uniques
Increase of 22% from 2007

7. New York Post
4,335,583 average monthly uniques
Increase of 30% from 2007

8. Chicago Tribune
4,271,833 average monthly uniques
Increase of 34% from 2007

9. New York Daily News
4,226,083 average monthly uniques
Increase of 68% from 2007

10. San Francisco Chronicle
4,158,000 average monthly uniques
Increase of 10% from 2007

11. Newsday
3,163,000 average monthly uniques
Increase of 7% from 2007

12. Politico
3,113,000 average monthly uniques
Increase of 132% from 2007

13. Chicago Sun-Times
2,884,417 average monthly uniques
Increase of 26% from 2007

14. The Houston Chronicle
2,808,750 average monthly uniques
Decrease of 10% from 2007

15. The Dallas Morning News
2,647,500 average monthly uniques
Increase of 52% from 2007

We’re only looking at the websites of news organizations that also print a newspaper here, because they face a special challenge in transitioning from print to the web. And while it seems clear that increasing traffic alone won’t solve the business problems of newspapers, it’s all they’ve got right now. (Politico makes our list because it distributes a small-circulation print edition when Congress is in session.)

Also keep in mind that Nielsen’s web stats, like its television ratings, are frequently disputed estimates that may be more valid in relative terms such as comparing a site’s traffic to its competitors. Fortunately, that’s what we’re doing here. And finally, we’re looking at monthly unique visitors, which advertisers prefer, while ignoring time spent per visitor because that data is all over the place and difficult to compare.

Nieman Journalism Lab goes on to note:

The New York Times’ victory isn’t surprising, but its margin of victory is stunning. NYTimes.com garnered 8,658,667 more visitors per month than its closest newspaper competitor, USAToday.com, or a difference of 80%. In 2007, the Times led USA Today by 5,033,534 or 52%.

Also notable among the national newspaper sites were year-over-year traffic increases of 54% and 60% at The Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal, respectively. The Journal’s rise could vindicate Rupert Murdoch’s decision a year ago to keep charging for the newspaper’s website despite complaints that its paywall was hindering traffic.

Now we'd like to see some stats on videojournalism viewership. We can't help but wonder to what extent the New York Times' admirable commitment to excellent videojournalism has boosted its online ratings.