Prom photos
I want to touch on a subject that has opened a discussion around the building amongst online folks and photojournalists in the past few weeks.
About two weeks ago I approached the photography department to see about shooting local high school prom photos for online publication.
Mainly, I wanted photos of people standing next to each other looking pretty on prom night, for lack of a better description.
There was consensus among everyone that the content has value. Photos of people at prom are not new for news organizations to showcase online, and photo galleries are immensely popular online.
It also was a consensus that not a lot of talent was needed to take these types of photos
I did argue that staff photographers automatically bring a higher quality of photography by just showing up than someone off the street or even most freelancers.
The debate focused on who should shoot these photos. I thought staff photographers should be the first choice.
And here is why: I think the future of journalism requires staffing decisions to be made with more emphasis placed on audience demand rather than tradition, and I think the newsroom has to be flexible enough to cover these types of events, like prom, because of audience demand.
And it this case, it also would help the company extend some sort of branch, albeit not a great one, to audience that is often underserved.
Staff photographers say their time is better spent on more creative storytelling assignments, and that the types of photos I was asking for – people standing in front of a camera looking pretty – are perfect for freelancers.
There also was a concern about daily coverage suffering for at least a couple of days while a staff photographer spent a good deal of time at these events on a Saturday night.
I can appreciate both sides.
I am wondering what others think. How do you or your news organizations handle these types of events?
The solution we came up with was to have two freelancers take photographs of three high proms so far. And, as of being online for a day, the prom photo galleries have about 46,000 page views.
Jason, this conundrum is a great illustration of the clash that’s rocking newspaper journalism as a whole. What’s so disruptive about social media’s rocking of the journalism boat is that the journalist is no longer the central figure.
You’re spot on, I think, with your assessment that audience demand should be a driver for us. Ours has gotten to be a rather elitist business.We have a tendency to say, “I’m a professional. In my professional opinion, what the audience wants has less value than what I want to give them.”
We cannot behave that way all the time anymore. It makes us irrelevant. And this isn’t just an issue for word journalists. Visual journalists are also facing a brave new future.
In the future, those who are still journalists do it all — words, visuals, context.
We are currently neck deep in prom photos. We are a group of six weekly newspapers and two daily newspapers. We are covering close to 35 proms in the course of four weeks. I’m using a combination of stringers and staffers. We have a pretty consistent group of stringers. I tell everyone covering a prom to shoot 3-5 photos that would be considered for print with full caption information. Then the rest of the photos they shoot can be “grip and grins.” Obviously, our staffers produce better photos, but when we’re covering this many proms, it’s impossible to staff them all. Frankly, we’re not half way through the season yet, and the galleries have gotten more hits than anything else on our websites. I think the first one up had nearly 10,000 hits in the first few days. I don’t feel grabbing “grip and grins” is all that challenging, and in a case like this, I feel like the audience which is used to YouTube and MySpace is forgiving of quality issues. Of course we want to represent our craft in the best way possible, but I do believe that providing the content at all puts our craft in the minds of people and gets them thinking about photography. As journalists we have to balance content and quality everyday. I story about a zoning meeting that end 20 mins before deadline will most likely not be written that well or be that interesting, but the content itself has value no matter it’s packaging. A record of high schoolers at prom has value whether it’s shot with a point and shoot or by professional, the content (the faces of happy kids attending an important moment) outweighs the packaging (the technical quality of the photographs) to our audience.