New York Times Multimedia Internship

Picked up off of Drew Vigal's Twitter feed: The New York Times is looking for multimedia interns. 

Speaker: Chris Weston, Feb. 18

Make sure this is on your calendar:

Chris Weston, managing editor at the Greenville (S.C.) News, will be doing a talk on "Transforming Newsrooms Amid Disruptive Innovations." It'll be in the Drewry Room on Wednesday, Feb. 18, at 12:15. See Sophie Barnes in room 233 by Tuesday so you can get free pizza.

Weston is a good friend to Grady and a guy who has an excellent grasp on how journalism is changing and needs to change to survive. Highly recommend you get to this.

UGA PJer Takes the Nikon Shootout

For the second time in three years, a UGA-trained photojournalist has won the Nikon Shootout at the Southern Short Course in News Photography. Josh Weiss, a 2008 graduate, won the live-shooting competition this past weekend in Charlotte. (Kelly Wegel won it in 2007.)

Weiss is currently on staff at the Gwinnett Daily Post. 

Super Twitter

Not intentional, but this post is much like the last - all about Twitter. The New York Times has an interactive ... well, I don't know what to call it ... thing that looks at what was Twittered throughout the Super Bowl Sunday night.

Click on the "People saying go" and let it play, paying attention to the timeline. Very entertaining. 

The Story of Twitter (in More Than 140 Characters)

I am still not convinced that Twitter is something of value. I use it. A LOT. But I do wonder whether it's just a play thing, a way to avoid time. And then some breaking news event happens and I know because I have a Twitter client running on my desktop (Spaz).

One of the creators, Dom Sagolla, has now told the story behind its creation. 

Photojournalism Talk on Campus

From the In Box ...

Dr. John Lucaites of Indiana University will be delivering a talk on Friday, February 6 from 4-5 pm in 214 Terrell Hall entitled "Boots and Hands: Photojournalism and Democratic Public Culture." The talk is part of the Department of Speech Communication's Colloquium Series.

Dr. Lucaites has made an undeniable impact in the study of how images and icons circulate through the culture. His most recent book, No Caption Needed (co-authored with Robert Hariman), has received enormous interdisciplinary acclaim in this regard. W.J.T. Mitchell called the book "the starting point for any future attempt to deal with the problem of the iconic photograph and its social uses."

Dr. Lucaites is a professor at Indiana University with appointments in Communication and Culture, American Studies, Cultural Studies, and is a fellow at the Poynter Center for Ethics and American Institutions.

Some further detail regarding the talk itself:

Photojournalism is a vital public art for a democratic public culture, but not because it provides what we ordinarily understand to be "news." Rather, we believe that it does its work by helping us to see and to be seen as citizens. In this essay we examine the recurring visual trope of "boots and hands" in everyday photojournalistic practices, focusing on how it provides an iconography for thinking about political character, relationships, and events. A subsidiary argument concerns how the specific practice functions as a remediation of the role of bodily gesture in classical rhetoric and the 17th and 18th century elocutionary movement.

Students at Work ... Sort Of

It's that time of the semester. Old cameras in new hands, learning where the buttons are and what they do. Time to take the intro students on a brief walk-about, make them shoot ... well, nothing, really. Just get used to metering and focusing and firing off frames. 

There is nothing I can do in the classroom that will make them better at this than forcing them to shoot. Experience is not the best teacher, it is the only teacher when you're starting out. 

What have you shot today?