Rick Valenzuela Wins 2010 Gordon Yoder Award
DURHAM, NC (February 16, 2010) - The National Press Photographers Foundation, Inc. has awarded multimedia editor Rick Valenzuela of The Phnom Penh Post the 2010 Gordon Yoder Award of $1,000 to assist with the expense of tuition and attending the National Press Photographers Association's 2010 NewsVideo Workshop in Norman, OK, in March.
The award was established by Gordon Yoder, who died in 2004, to assist a working television photojournalist who wants to attend the workshop. The announcement of Valenzuela's selection was made by today by professor James W. Brown of the Indiana University School of Journalism, the scholarship chairman for the NPPF.
There are not very many foreign television photojournalists in Cambodia, Brown said. In his application name wrote to Brown, "I would like to meet my colleagues, contemporaries and industry veterans and leaders, see more of their work and be inspired by it, and create new friendships and networks."
The training and faculty mentoring that takes place in Norman each year is what Valenzuela is seeking. “The foundation of what I know about video journalism comes from dating a TV photographer and reading her copy of Frederick Shook’s textbook,” Valenzuela wrote. “The rest comes from the Internet, and lots of trial and error in the field."
"At this stage in my career, and in the path that I've taken to get here, the Norman Workshop seems obviously essential, for both training and technique, and for networking. It will bring me in contact with its renowned faculty as well as the photojournalism’s future leaders, and most of all teach me new methods to bring back to Cambodia and elsewhere so I can tell those people’s stories in ways that are fresh, captivating and moving.”
In the fall of 1937 Gordon Yoder got a job at Jamieson Film Co. in Dallas, TX. He had no professional experience and worked for free until Mr. Jamieson thought he was good enough to pay a salary. That took two weeks. Yoder began shooting newsreel stories for Paramount News in 1943. When the Korean War broke out, Paramount sent him to Korea as a cameraman for the American Newsreel Pool. In 1952 he went to work for Telenews and worked for them for 16 years, until they folded all news operations.
Yoder founded Professional Cine Products in 1968 and later changed the name to Gordon Yoder, Inc. He made many improvements to the Cine Voice conversion and designed and built motion picture equipment. By l977, tape began to appear in the newsrooms instead of film, and Yoder received an offer of a buyout in early 1978. He jumped at the chance and retired.
During his career Yoder photographed U.S. presidents from Harry S. Truman to Richard Nixon, presidential inaugurations, the integration battles of the south, the landings of astronauts Alan Shepard and John Glenn, and major disasters and news stories across the country.
As Gordon said upon retirement, “I've never worked a day in my life - it's all been fun.”
This year's NewsVideo Workshop is at the University of Oklahoma in Norman from March 14 through 19, 2010. More information about it is online here.
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