From our home to yours: Happy New Year, Merry Christmas, and happy holidays. I sincerely hope your holiday – no matter how it was celebrated – was full of warmth and joy!

#ONPA – Contest and Conference Updates …

… stay tuned as exciting announcements are forthcoming!

#NEWS – it’s all local

LABOR, LABOR, and more LABOR NEWS! Buzz-phrase of the year: “Macroeconomic volatility”.

1/ Management at many legacy media organizations are at odds with both journalists and readership these days. Strikes and walkouts continue to affect the industry through the month of December. And yet, despite the turmoil, ‘papers still get put out’ and content is still produced, as they say. Sadly, at some papers, management is actively hiring around strikes, such as at the PPG where in a recent job posting seeking to fill a staff photographer position the job posting actually contains fine print advising the job replaces one currently involved in a labor dispute! The audacity!

The first labor union for journalists was formed in 1933. You can read about the TNG, here.

DEVELOPMENTS

• NYT: walkouts loom for Dec. 8
  • Strike has begun, as confirmed across social media. Read the report from Democracy Now!
  • Many freelancers have been voicing support, such as freelance advocate and photographer, Todd Bigelow, and well known freelancer Julia Robinson, as noted below:

    

  • Threatened walkout has cascading effect upon other aspects of business

Styles Editor Tanner Curtis said in a Tweet, “We want our pension intact. We want our health care funded. We want raises that reflect our contribution to the company’s success. I pledge to walk out with more than 1,000 @NYTimesGuild members for a fair and complete contract.

Photo Editor Greg Kendall Ball also said in a Tweet, “The truth is @nytimes is a blank page without @NYTimesGuild members. It’s time they gave us a contract that reflects our worth. I pledge to walk out with more than 1,000 @NYTimesGuild members to demand a fair and complete contract.”

Politico weighed in on the matter: Opinion | The Empty Threat from the New York Times Union

• CNN: layoffs have occurred
• NPR: hiring freeze and $20m shortfall
  • Internship program has been paused; read about it here from NPR legend, Stu Rushfield
• WaPo: Magazine staff laid off, given no reassignment or other options to remain
  • In a Tweet, Dec. 14 from @anniegowen, Publisher Fred Ryan has announced that layoffs are coming for the paper in the first quarter of 2023 – number unclear

    

• Pittsburg Post-Gazette: journalists still on strike; reports on social media channels that scabs have been recruited
  • Dec. 6: No deal. Read all about it.
  • They’re still hunting for scabs

    

• Vice Media CEO Nancy Dubac told staff it plans to cut costs by “up to 15%” following smaller cuts earlier this month.
• Recurrent Ventures, a venture equity-backed digital media rollup company, laid off 52 staffers in October.
• Outside Media, the media company home to dozens of outdoor enthusiast brands, lid off 12% of its staff last week, following a 15% cut in May, per Adweek.
• Protocol, the tech news website launched from Politico in 2020, will shut down by the end of the year, according to a company-wide memo obtained by Axios. Around 60 employees will be laid off.
• Morning Brew, a business media company that caters to Millennials, plans to lay off 14% of its staff due to advertiser uncertainty, per a memo sent from its CEO to staff last week.
• Buzzfeed, “NEW: @BuzzFeed cutting roughly 12% its workforce (~180 employees), it said in a regulatory filing today. – It last announced cuts to its news division in March -Share price $BZFD today is $1.10, all-time low.” @sarafischer, Axios reporter via Twitter.
• Gannett: an estimated 200 additional laid off after a 400-person layoff spree in October and reduction of benefits, furloughs, and buyouts shortly thereafter
  • And this, published Dec. 17: “Everyone’s just a dollar sign to them’: Gannett journalists reel from new cutbacks”
  • And this, published Dec. 23: “Detroit — Peter Bhatia told newspaper staffers Friday that he will be stepping down as editor and vice president of the Detroit Free Press ahead of anticipated layoffs. The announcement was made at a Friday morning virtual staff-wide meeting.”

• Politico: In a town hall just announced that they’ll be hiring for 150 new jobs next year, just across the Potomac from WaPo incidentally.

2/ Big, if it ends up passing:

• WaPo: Meta could remove U.S. news if Congress helps outlets demand payment
• Related: Slate – Congress’ Best Idea to Save Local Journalism Would Actually Hurt It

#PEOPLE

1/ ONPA Treasurer Barbara Perenic posted on FB about the retirement of long time Columbus Dispatch staff photojournalist Fred Squillante.

2/ Long-time Enquirer staffer Amanda Rossman took a voluntary buyout. We wish you great success in future endeavors! Editors, take note:

3/ Barbara Perenic also reports that, “Photographers Shane Flanigan and Lorie Cecil Gardner of This WeekNews are both moving on after the weekly division of newspapers for Central Ohio was shuttered by Gannett. They both took buyouts instead of working for the Dispatch.”

4/ Karen Schiely, long time staffer at the Akron Beacon Journal, took a buyout around the same time as Scott Heckel at the Canton Repository whom was mentioned in last month’s newsletter.

#INSPIRATIONS

TOP PHOTOS OF ‘22 ROLL, IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER and by no means complete – just some great one’s that I viewed.

• Women Photograph
• AP
• Time
• Reuters
• CNN
• SF Chronicle
• The Guardian: 25 of the best World Cup photos ever – in pictures
• The Telegraph: The winners of Bird Photographer of the Year awards have been revealed from more than 1,600 entries
• The Atlantic
• NatGeo: The story behind 9 of the photos from our Pictures of the Year
• USAT

GENERAL

1/ Lisa Scalfaro, Record-Courier staff photographer made some iconic photographs from a fire in Kent, Dec. 2.

2/ The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culturereleased a platform that makes its archive accessible to those outside of its Washington, D.C. home. The museum now is an officially searchable online website/resource. You can view that here.

3/ Cincinnati area freelancer Aaron Doster continues work on a fun snapshot project made on instant film all the while on assignment.

4/ Great inspiration from a lot of amazing photojournalism not made in North America within the ZUMA Press IG feed. ZUMA was founded by Scott McKiernan.

5/ Longtime photojournalist Gary Gardiner posted a beautiful photograph in his FB feed. Gary maintains a blog, My Last Photograph, in which he posts a photograph a day since November, 2004.

6/ So much of the inspirations I find are from photographers I have never met in person, such as this gem from Seattle freelancers Lindsey Wasson. Story here.

7/ Photo Booth: A Woman’s Intimate Record of Wyoming in the Early Twentieth Century

Lora Webb Nichols created and collected some twenty-four thousand negatives documenting life in her small town.

8/ @latimes Staff Photojournalist Kent Nishimura, based in Washington D.C., shared an amazing iPhone photograph which he paired with Profoto strobes! Did you know this was possible??? I sure didn’t. What a great picture!

9/ Lindsey’s vacation photo is just so great!

10/ ‘The Cartier-Bresson of the East’: Fan Ho’s Hong Kong – in pictures

11/ David LaBelle, again with some inspiring images.

12/ Cleveland-area freelancer David Richard with a great reaction of DeShaun Watson after a TD.

13/ From the first month of the year: “The Kept and the Killed,” is a fascinating read about the 270,000 photographs commissioned by the US Farm Security Administration to document the Great Depression, [in which] more than a third were “killed”. Erica X Eisen examines the history behind this hole-punched archive and the unknowable void at its center.