"Did You Get the Shot?"

Every photojournalist will eventually come back to the newsroom with some tale of personal woe and pain from an assignment. And someone, somewhere, in that newsroom will ask if they got the shot. Never mind if a lens was smashed, a camera destroyed ... or if the shooter had been pierced by a javelin.

That guy deserves a raise.

"Pay More Attention"

That title is a bit of a play on what this post is about. In, ahem, January 2007, my colleague Tim Atherton launched a blog - Muse-ings. I noted its existence and made a note to follow it ... sigh, then never did. I stumbled across the note this morning and started poking at it.

I came across one recent post about Simon Robert's "We English" project and loved the last part of the post - a listing of notes the photographer wrote to himself. Check it out, I'm going to add that to my list of things to use in the classroom.

Cover Shots

Khoi Vinh has a marvelous post up talking about album cover artwork. If you read through the comments, an interesting idea is pushed out ... that newer records need to rely on bolder designs that are readable at a smaller scale. And not just because we've moved from albums to CDs, but that we've now moved down to that little square in the corner of iTunes.

I admit to still having a sizable record collection - the big ones with black vinyl inside. I'll even admit to having turned a few of my favorite album covers into home-made posters when I was younger, including The Del Fuegos' Boston, Mass. and Foreigner's Agent Provocateur. Why? They were clean and evocative of ... well, whatever I was feeling in 1986, I suppose.

(Plus, who else but Dan Zanes could pen a line like, "I stayed awake last week ...?")

Newly Minted Multimedia Journalists

Rusty Bailey, who's at the Rome (Ga.) News-Tribune this summer as a multimedia intern, sent along a link to his first solo video - and a spot news piece, to boot.

And Sara Guevara, in her first week on staff at the Gainesville (Ga.) Times shot a piece on a new business. But not just any new business - this is a tourist helicopter service.

Not bad for less than a week off campus ...

Wicked Awesome Primary Results Map

Damon Kiesow up at the Nashua Telegraph tweeted this a few moments ago: it's an interactive map of Indiana with county-by-county results from Tuesday's presidential primary.

How cool is that?

Make Your Own Documentary

PBS' NOVA program has done something stunning - they're releasing all of the raw video footage from their Car of the Future program. You can download it and re-edit the show.

Ever wanted to make a documentary about ecology and car culture? Here's your stock footage.

No commercial usage, but that's okay by me. For all of the multimedia students who spent the last several weeks fighting with Final Cut, are you ready to get back into it?

So many ideas that I have now ...

Community Building

Something I can't really talk about with any level of expertise (yet), but something I think we need to talk about: Internet communities.

My reason for being a journalist was always community based - in order to succeed as a democratic institution, I believe it is imperative that we understand our community. And that's where journalism comes in.

Steve Yelvington has a post up about how news organizations need to rethink their approach to the Internet and he goes into the way-back machine to pull thoughts from Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville's Democracy in America.

Which now has me thinking I need to read that (maybe again, I don't remember reading but it seems as if I should have) and that there may be a way of promoting the sense of community better. I'm not sure how (yet), but I'm working on it.

Family and Photojournalism

NPR has an interview with National Geographic's Annie Griffiths Belt where she talks about life on the road with her family. Includes a comment about one of her kids traveling to 13 countries before she was born.