By Jenni Kolsky Goldman
©2005 News Photographer magazine
After four years or more of college with a major in photojournalism or visual communication, and with an internship or two plus some “real world” experience and a “stellar” portfolio, even the best and the brightest of the graduating classes might be surprised by what directors of photography, picture editors, and assistant managing editors are really looking for in today’s newly-minted job candidates.
“The kind of thing that separates a good photographer from a great photojournalist is emphasizing the journalism part – communicating, writing complete captions, writing a good letter,” said Brian Peterson, the photo coach at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, a job that he does in addition to shooting.
These aspects are often overlooked or intentionally avoided by photographers who rely on their image-making talents, even though they are looking for work within a larger culture of wordsmiths. “As a photographer myself, I know that many of the battles that I have had to fight and win are in the newsroom. I’ve really needed to be able to communicate – whether it is verbally or by writing proposals,” he said. “It is the only thing that the word side knows, and if you can’t communicate with them then you are not going to get too far.”
One thing that Tom Stanford repeatedly works on with new photographers is cutlines, “the major area of ongoing training.” He is the photography editor at The Tennessean in Nashville, TN.
Cutlines are also an issue at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, where copy editor Trudi Hahn has written the 5-page Star Tribune Caption Guide for Photographers and the 12-page reference, Building Bridges with Captions. Both are distributed within the photography department.
Recognizing the importance of writing skills to future newspaper photographers, Joe Lippincott has made captions and writing a full 30 percent of each project grade in the photojournalism course that he teaches at Boston University.
“I’ve always been sort of a nut about making people get complete cutlines,” he said. “Many times my former students will tell me that during their interview, or after they get a job, the first thing they hear from the editor is ‘Where did you learn that cutlines are so important?’”
Lippincott, a former picture editor for The Patriot-Ledger and The Detroit News, is inclined to push the things in class that he found to be problems when he was dealing with photographers and interns at the newspaper everyday. “Cutlines are a big piece of that,” he said, “which is why I teach it.”
“A good caption has to have the basic ‘who, what, where, when, and why’ and then some. Picture captions need to be written concisely, they need to make sense and be accurate,” said Eileen Blass, a former student of Lippincott’s who is now a staff photographer at USA Today. “And then there are things I learned along the way in 25 or so years in the business,” Blass said. “We are photographers and reporters.”
The Interview. “We are looking for people who are smart,” said J. Bruce Baumann, executive editor of the The Courier & Press in Evansville, IN. “We are looking for people who don’t have tunnel vision, by that I mean people who think about more things than photojournalism … and people who have interests besides newspapers.
“When somebody tells me that all they do is photography and all they want is to work on newspapers, I don’t think they have a life. I am looking for someone who has a life.”
With many qualified students in each graduating class, there are unfortunately more students graduating than there are job openings. That is nothing new to Stanford, who has helped former “good” interns enter the competitive job market.
For every opening at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Peterson said that there are at least a dozen applicants that are qualified or more than qualified. The quickest way to land on the reject pile is to misspell the name of the picture editor, something that happens more often than you’d like to think.
Another easy reason to eliminate a candidate is the “excuse attitude,” Peterson said. “Photographers who give up early don’t go anywhere.” They end up doing what is handed to them while complaining the entire time. Peterson doesn’t accept, “I couldn’t do this because … or I don’t have that because …”
Clyde Mueller, the director of photography for the Santa Fe New Mexican, looks for the same qualities in hiring staff photographers as he does in interns. “I look for low maintenance, motivated, mature, clear thinkers, diverse life experiences, open minded, strive for excellence, are willing to improve, hard workers, who have an unfailing understanding of, and commitment to, a free press and what it means to society.”
Internships. How important are internships? Starting his career as an intern 44 years ago in Indiana at the old Evansville Courier, Baumann can’t think of anyone he’s hired in the last 25 years who hasn’t had experience. The best candidates are the ones who’ve had a least one internship, he said, and he insists that internships should be paid. “Slave labor was abolished almost 150 years ago.”
Preferring photographers “with something under their belt” who don’t need “handholding,” Sue Morrow, the assistant managing editor for photography at the St. Petersburg Times in Florida, won’t even hire interns without internship experience. (Morrow has since moved to the Sacramento Bee in California.)
Beware though of being labeled a “professional intern,” a point on which Baumann concurs. “There is a limit,” he said. “It is a turn off – the person who goes from one internship to the next to the next to the next. I think a couple of internships is enough with one being sufficient.”
What’s valuable to employers is real newspaper experience. Making the transition from school to the profession is very difficult without internship experience, a practice that Stanford believes should begin between the sophomore and junior years and continue until graduation. He would like it to be an academic requirement. Stanford’s career in newspaper photography started two years before he received a degree from Texas A&M.
Peterson does not believe the internship should be mandatory; he thinks of it more as an exercise in personal growth than as an entry point to getting a job. He started in Minnesota at the biweekly Park Rapids Enterprise some 25 years ago with no previous internship and worked for three additional newspapers before arriving at the Star Tribune.
“I climbed up the ladder the hard way,” he said. “That is certainly a legitimate way to do things too.”
Portfolio. A portfolio is “kind of like a smile,” said Jeff Malet, the picture editor of the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, a daily newspaper in Ontario, CA, serving eastern Los Angeles County. It is the first impression, the introduction to the photographer, a door opening. Most photographers come to him with little experience and require a lot of grooming, a responsibility he is grateful to share with his photography staff.
In contrast, The Tennessean’s Stanford expects a candidate for a full-time staff position to have sports, news, and a picture story. “If they are missing any one of these elements, they aren’t fully prepared for a job.”
The same problems that hurt student portfolios also hinder professional portfolios. Too much emphasis is placed on the winners from last year’s contests, said Baumann, with photographers duplicating the same stories. He calls it the “cookie cutter” effect.
He would rather see photographers be their own person, “photographing things that are of interest to them, of interest to their community, telling stories that are new and different, rather than the 999,000th Alzheimer’s story.”
There is a consensus on this point. “Younger photographers tend to have very clichéd picture stories in their portfolios – you’ll see the boxing story, the stripper-mom story, disease-of-the-month, and Alzheimer’s is a big one,” said Morrow, who has won POY awards for picture editing on multiple occasions. And while she believes that these are all important stories, they’ve all been overdone. “If you do them, you better do them better than you’ve ever seen,” she said.
Ensuring that photographers don’t lose their individuality and creativity is part of Peterson’s job as a photo coach. He looks for a strong, personal vision. “We don’t want all of our photographers to be clones – to see in the same way.”
The newspaper photojournalists’ challenge is to show the world in a way that people wouldn’t normally notice it, he said, with images worthy of a photographer’s exclamation such as: “I would have never even thought of looking at it that way, or I wouldn’t have thought of lighting it that way or composing it that way.” The point is not so much to make things look different, but to find the technique that best helps people to see the story being told.
There are also intangibles. “If I have a large number of photographers who are more comfortable as documentary photographers, I might lean toward (hiring) someone who has a strong news or sports portfolio,” Stanford said.
Peterson agrees that jobs can be elusive for reasons beyond your control and offers encouragement. “You must not give up,” he said. “Believe in what you do.”
But, of course, there is more to it than that. “A great portfolio gets you in the door,” Peterson said. “A good work ethic and the ability to communicate and work with others get you the job.”
Photojournalism School. “This is a real hot button for me,” Morrow said. “We need to be teaching our students how to read a newspaper everyday. I really don’t get a sense that colleges are teaching news judgment and what it means to a daily newspaper.”
Morrow believes that news judgment is about community journalism and focusing on issues of relevance to the readers, the “bread and butter” of making daily pictures, and not the long-term projects that are pretty unrealistic in the newspaper world’s limitations of time, budget, and space.
“There are some wonderful programs out there,” said Baumann, including the University of Missouri at Columbia’s School of Journalism, Ball State University, Ohio University, Western Kentucky University, and San Jose State University. “But when you start counting the really good photojournalism schools in the country, you are talking about less than 10.” He acknowledges that most programs are keeping up with the technology and its changes – i.e., digital photography.
These are also important factors to Malet, a graduate of the former photojournalism program at California State University in Long Beach. He believes that schools need to teach how to use Adobe PhotoShop, how to transmit digitally, and how to use a laptop in the field. He also wants graduates to know how to edit when they are away from an editor, how to shoot from a variety of angles and perspectives, how to write comprehensive captions, and how to meet a deadline.
Lippencott, photography editor turned educator, also knows what’s needed out there. His teaching style mimics real newspaper experiences. “Let’s say the playoff games are on. It’s 4:05 p.m. You will go down to Fenway Park. You will find a way into the park. You will photograph an inning of the game. You will come back and present me a print in 45 minutes,” he said. “And you know, by God, they do it.”
Teaching is especially rewarding for Lippincott when the assignment transcends its purpose. “They realize that no matter the odds, no matter what they are going to encounter later in life, that they can do it.”
Where to Begin. In order to succeed there must be the “desire to place photography above all other things,” said Larry Roberts, the assistant managing editor for photography for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in Western Pennsylvania.
From the moment a choice is made to pursue becoming a newspaper photojournalist there are steps one can take that can make the transition from student to a working professional a little easier. Stanford suggests the following: “Make contacts with newspapers early in your schooling. Make contacts with picture editors at professional seminars. Have your work critiqued so that you can improve. If a picture editor suggests a change in the portfolio, follow up with a revised portfolio and a note. Try to do a job shadow for a day at a newspaper you are interested in. If there is a newspaper near your home or university, find a photographer you respect and see if they’ll become a mentor to you.” And then nurture those connections and relationships over time.
Pete Cross, assistant managing editor for photography at The Palm Beach Post, not only hired a former intern recommended by a colleague but he is also working with a colleague whom he met as an intern 26 years ago. “Newspapers are really a small network of folks who all know each other,” he said. “You’ll find a family of friends and professionals for life.”
