April 1, 2023 Newsletter

#NEWS – It’s all local

What happened in the industry this month?

#ONPA MATTERS

1/ 2022 ONPA Television year-end contest results are in as of March 13, wrapping up contest results for the 2022 calendar year. Congratulations to the Ali Ghanbari Television Photographer of the Year winners:

• 1st – Scott Doelling, WBNS-TV, Columbus – 43 points
• 2nd – Chris Reece, WJW-TV, Cleveland – 38 points
• 3rd – Joe Comer, WTOL-TV, Toledo – 37 points

2/ The Board is still seeking to fill the position of Secretary. Please reach out to Board President, Andrew Dolph: onpaprez@gmail.com.

3/ Judges teaching – Three of our 2022 contest judges (two shown here) are working photojournalists and current professors. Jose Carlos Fajardo is teaching photography at Las Positas College in addition to working for the Bay Area News Group. And, Mike Fagans produces independent documentaries as well working as an Assistant Professor of Journalism at Ole Miss. He is currently leading a group of students covering the aftermath of the tornado that has killed 26 people in Mississippi.

 

#OTHER MATTERS

1/ Cleveland Scene posted the picture below of a rather industry-specific alarming billboard. The QR code leads to an online petition that you can read here. It says:

“FOX 8 is owned by the Nexstar corporation which reported over 1 BILLION DOLLARS in free-flow cash last year AND 1.24 BILLION DOLLARS in free-flowing cash in 2021.  They have reported 293 MILLION dollars in cash in the last quarter alone. The company returned 730 MILLION dollars to shareholders yet only offered a 1.25 percent increase to its photojournalists at FOX8 in Cleveland, Ohio.

Photojournalists at FOX8 have endured the worst of the worst conditions over the last 2 and a half years putting their lives in danger to bring the news to the public fearlessly.

Tell Fox 8 to support their Photojournalists and give them a fair contract now!”

2/ AI and photography, and by extension – photojournalism. It’s happening, and the implications are dire. Will our jobs be replaced? Unlikely. Will we have to fight back tooth and nail against distrust in what we do as the line of what is real is further erase? We’re already there.

• This is very much an alarm call, and Fred Ritchin offers solutions. Q&A: Fred Ritchin on AI and the threat to photojournalism no one is talking about
  

  “We really somehow have overlooked this challenge to the photograph as witness. It’s interesting to me: my Vanity Fair piece, which came out ten days ago—as far as I can tell, not one publication linked to it in the world, whereas what I am describing in the essay is enormous. We’re very close to destroying the credibility of the photograph. That’s a major step.”

• By now you’ve likely seen a lot of examples of just how detrimental to truth AI image creation can be. There’s just too many to cite at this point. Out of control is a good summation.
• In this week’s NPPA newsletter, Christopher T. Assaf challenges readers to take an AI quiz, courtesy of WaPo.
  

  Can you determine what AI generates, either text or image? As a participant in an automated news study in 2019, it was relatively easy to figure out the badly-worded, computer-authored text. But now? I suggest taking the Washington Post’s AI quiz. You’ll likely be surprised. I know I was.

  Here was my result: You scored 7 out of 8. Congratulations! Generative AI didn’t fool you. You can spot the difference between work generated by humans and machines.

  POLL How did you fare in the test? 8 of 8 7 of 8 6 of 8 5 of 8 4 of 8 or less

3/ Nieman Lab: Social media policies are failing journalists

4/ Also from Nieman Lab: The scale of local news destruction in Gannett’s markets is astonishing

#PEOPLE

Reports of people in the industry on the move – lot’s of losses this month

1/ Jintak Han, a @viscomohiou MA candidate, has taken a job with the Washington Post in Seoul, South Korea, as a breaking news editor “as well as illustrate news and enterprise stories and help curate the photos on the homepage during the overnight hours in Washington. This position in Seoul allows the Photo Department to support the newsroom’s 24-hour cycle,” according to WaPo. Congratulations! Give Jintak a follow on the Tweeter. You can read the WaPo announcement of his hiring, here.

2/ Ryan Grzybowksi, current OU student and 2nd place winner of the ONPA Larry Fullerton Photojournalism Scholarship, shared a post on Facebook of a recent visit to Burklehagen Studio in Cleveland. The studio’s owner, Andrew, is also an OU grad.

Ryan said that a food and product photography workshop has been set up in years past, and this is a return to in-person events since COVID. During the two-day workshop, Ryan also said, “they had all OU alum come and talk to us about the industry the first night and ask questions. Then the next day we went out and had free range to photograph what we wanted and they critiqued us the after. I loved the idea and the execution of the workshop.”

What a wonderful opportunity!

3/ Brooklyn, N.Y. based photographer Ashley Markle, 2017 – Kent State University, B.S. Digital Film, traveled back to her hometown of Ravenna, OH, to contribute to the NYT ongoing series Where We Are along with staff writer, Jazmine Hughes.

Where We Are is a series about young people coming of age and the spaces where they create community, produced by Alice Fang, Jennifer Harlan and Eve Lyons.

You can view Ashley and Jazmine’s story, here.

u/d: Looks like the story just published in print!

4/ JD Pooley has moved to the dark side ; ) – taking a new position with Channel 13, an ABC affiliate station in Toledo! He was formerly a Sentinal-Tribune staff photographer in Bowling Greene. JD tells me he worked at the Sent-Trib for 26 years.

5/ Congratulations to retired Canton Repository staff photographer Bob Rossiter, for being the first photographer inducted into the Ohio Prep Sportswriters Association Hall of Fame awards. Photograph by Kevin Whitlock.

 

#INSPIRATIONS and #RESOURCES

Helpful things

1/ In honor Women’s History month

• Getty Images photographer Elsa Garrison is highlighting poignant and pivotal moments she photographed of women in sports.

  In her first post, she says:

First up, some pictures from back in 1998 when I had the honor of covering @ilaborders As a female pitcher in men’s leagues, Borders achieved numerous baseball milestones at the college and professional levels, including being the first female pitcher to start and win a men’s professional baseball game. Here are some images from that time.

Check it out!

• CNN has curated a wonderful brief on women photographers: “These are the pioneering women of photojournalism”

• I’ve mentioned emergent journalistic startups in previous newsletters. Here’s an important Q&A with Marie D. De Jesús on ‘“How compelling photojournalism helps us forge bonds with the community.” Marie is the first photo editor at Houston Landing – now one month in to their existence, as well as the first Latina president of the National Press Photographers Association
• A Russian Vivian Meyer? Interview: Woman Discovers Over 30,000 Secret Photos Left Behind by Her Mother

• What a frame! Fatima is a staff photographer for AP, based in Gaza. Give her a follow.

• One woman and her camera saved millions: Honoring Alice Seeley Harris on International Women’s Day for her photos of Congo atrocities
• Kim Chapin to join the L.A. Times as executive director for photography
• Your ONPA Treasurer and Columbus Dispatch staff photographer, Barbara Perenic, is out west in Seattle covering Ohio State Women’s Basketball! Here’s a link to Barb’s coverage of Ohio State’s Elite 8 win.

• Carol Guzy reflects on her storied career and the incredible relationships she’s forged.

3/ Couple Finds Trove of 2,000 Cameras and Lenses in Storage Unit

4/ Check out Eric Seals’ coverage of the Michigan Nordic Festival.

5/ Wow!!! This photo by Orlando Ramirez is an incredibly well timed and well planned photo. I’m guessing this is a remote.

6/ Eric Thayer made an amazing enviro-political photograph — is that a thing? No matter your politics, I hope you appreciate this one.

7a/ Sometimes, all you need is one photo. There of course has been an immense amount of other amazing coverage of the recent flooding in California. But this one from Carlos says it all.

7b/ Sometimes, all you need is one photo. This one I almost did not include, but it’s that important. And, it’s equally important to recognize the grit required to simply be there.

8/ When your friends go down, apparently it’s okay to make a picture AND transmit it on the wire?! There was a little chatter on social media about this moment.

9/ When the Light, Shadow and Stars Aligned: Standing Where Ansel Adams Stood

An enigmatic photograph by America’s most famous landscape photographer led to a forensic hunt to identify exactly when and where it was taken.

10/ This month marks the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq by the United States, sparking civil war, sectarian violence and collapse of the region. We now know that the invasion was under false pretenses which will be argued about forever.

• Washington Post staff photographer, Salwan Georges, traveled back to his homeland to reflect.

  You can also listen to his interview with NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly.

  I’ve always felt the opportunity to get to know my country was taken from me. What I knew about my homeland came from books and stories told by family. A part of me was always missing, yet I always felt attached to Iraq.

• NYT Opinion – Guest Essay: 20 Years On From That Hotel Roof in Baghdad, I Know the Limits of My Trade, by Moises Saman.
  

  As I continued to cover the war, I chased dramatic shots of violent conflict, the kind that make a war photographer’s career. I was driven almost entirely by the demands of the daily news, and by the need to prove myself. But events along the way began to complicate my role as a chronicler of the war, and I was forced to reassess my work as a photojournalist.

• Contact Press special contributor and freelance photojournalist Yunghi Kim walked for 4 days to get into the country from Turkey upon announcement of the invasion.
  

  There was a small group of photographers camped out on the Turkish border with Northern Iraq, in the small towns of Cizre and Silopi. I thought entering Iraq would be a cakewalk: All I needed to do was follow the U.S. troops as they made their second push into Iraq, this time from Turkey. I thought wrong.

• Sinan Antoon, an Iraqi poet and novelist, writes “I cannot forgive what American terrorism did to my country.”

  The wind is a blind mother
  stumbling
  over the corpses
  no shrouds
  save the clouds
  but the dogs
  are far quicker

  The moon is a graveyard
  for light
  the stars are women
  wailing.

  Tired from carrying the coffins
  the wind leaned
  against a palm tree
  A satellite inquired:
  Whereto now?
  The silence
  in the wind’s cane murmured:
  “Baghdad”
  and the palm tree caught fire.

11/ Gisele Grayson, Marc Silver and Ben de la Cruz write a newsletter for NPR called, Goats & Soda, in which they ask, “How do you take a picture of happiness?”

They reached out to photographers for answers.

12/ The Secret Art of the Family Photo

13/ From the what’s-old-is-new-again desk, Meg McLaughlin photographed San Diego Padres Spring Training on film!

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