Today was the last day of work for seventy-five Express-News journalists, including several of my most admired staff photographers. I'm not exactly sure of all who are being laid off, though they will surely be missed.
Some of the best photos, the news clippings I have tacked on my wall, came from those photographers. The clippings were hung to inspire me, to remind me of what can be achieved only by hard work and perseverance. These photographers have motivated my determination for success, and they continue to teach me, regardless of their absence from the page.
They will pick themselves up and dust off the economic woes, grabbing their camera and going back to work.
Several have decided to freelance. Photojournalist Mark Sobhani made a website for potential clients, detailing wedding and portrait rates. Mark is an A-1 photographer, and an amazing photojournalist. He and many others were undeservingly forced to abandon their family at the Express, forced to avoid further abandoning what defines them and doing what they love to support their families.
Mark Sobhani at the Express,
When I mentored with William Luther, I felt the comradery among that photo team, of which every member felt so grateful to be a part of the others' lives. It reminds me of what I have felt working with those at The Ranger and in our News Photo One class, those who are as passionate about the job and the success of yourself and others as you are.
This must not be made less eminent in our minds, we cannot begin to stop motivating each other, to lend a helping hand or communicate our feelings about this career. This positive and supportive element of my classmates and mentors is what keeps me as a student working hard, and without that element, I find myself less motivated or doubting my own abilities.
Send a kind word to the Express-News photo staff by e-mailing them or writing on their blogs. We as photojournalism students must continue to support and learn from each other during these doubt-filled times. I find myself struggling to maintain an unwavering dedication to this work, although I love photojournalism and will work my hardest to make it, the effort and end results must be reciprocated; who takes pictures only for their own eyes?
Some current and remaining staffers (all have a facebook, too):
Billy Calzada's Blog, video and stills
Kin Man Hui, former Ranger staff
Lisa Krantz, amazing amazing amazing
Nicole Fruge, see for yourself....
The proliferation of online information has benefited millions of people to gain easy access to information (visual and literal) in the past decade. While we are happily enjoy viewing free information at our finger tips, most of us forget that someone has to paid to collect them. When more and more people refuse to pay for information they get from hard working journalists, and believe in what they get from some second-handed, info collected from untrained journalists on the www, the journalism business has a problem, so as the society.
ReplyDeleteWhen the economy is good, advertising money the news business get can still survive. But not in a recession like what we are experiencing.
Should we start thinking about paying for trustworthy valuable information? Is there a different model of distributing and receiving news information? Can it be something like people paying 10 cents on the web just to get what they want to read on sports section without paying for the whole newspaper or magazine which we hardly finish reading all of them?
No one knows the answer, but we need to start looking for it because genuine journalism is too vital to our society to lose.