This feature highlights visual journalists in small markets who are often doing it all on their own with little support and few eyes on their work. Nominate someone (or yourself) by sending an email to [email protected] with the subject line: Small market nomination.
Name: Dan Rainville
Publication: The Evening Sun, Hanover, Pennsylvania (and more broadly the dozen or so USA Today Network publications throughout the state).
Twitter: @D_Rainville
How long in the business? Four years
Size of photo staff? Just me
Photo editor on staff? Never had one, unfortunately. Since I started here, the staff size of our 106-year-old local newspaper has shrunk by 75%.
Success can look different per most situations. What was a big success for you in this position and why?
I think the biggest success is that I’m still in this industry and still able to find meaning in the work. I’m a full-time photographer, but I’m also equally a videographer and increasingly now (and very reluctantly) a writer, too. In a period of fewer than three years, I watched as layoffs and attrition whittled our tiny staff of eight down to two. (The physical newsroom is gone now as well.) There was even a period of 10 months (during the pandemic) when I was the only staffer here. It’s an impossible task we’re dealt, and it hurts to see all the ways in which local newspapers are failing to properly serve their communities. But hopefully, from all the hardship there’s been some fortitude building in me that means I’ll be able to handle just about anything else the future of this profession throws at me — and hopefully, there are brighter days ahead.
Why do you love photojournalism?
I enjoy the variety of the unknown. I enjoy not knowing (and then finding out) what something and someone will look like when photographed. On a recent assignment in Philadelphia, a woman we were profiling as part of a statewide living wage project asked me a similar question. I told her if I wasn’t a photojournalist, I would probably never find myself riding a SEPTA bus in Kensington talking to her; I would never have had the privilege of learning and sharing her story with the world.
Contact info and website: danielrainville.com and [email protected]
Scroll down to see a selection of Dan's work.
Joel Rosenbaum, The Reporter, Vacaville, California, News Photographer, June 2021
Carin Dorghalli, Chico (Calif.) Enterprise-Record, News Photographer, Jan/Feb 2021, Page 36
Khadejeh Nikouyeh, Greensboro News & Record, Greensboro, N.C., News Photographer, Sept/Oct 2020, Page 22
Gavin McIntyre, The Post and Courier, Charleston, S.C., News Photographer, July/Aug 2020, Page 20
Jessica Phelps, The Newark Advocate (Ohio), News Photographer, May/June 2020, Page 52
Marlena Sloss, The Herald, Dubois County, Indiana, News Photographer, March/April 2020, Page 28
Nathan Howard, The Columbian, Vancouver, Washington, News Photographer, Jan/Feb 2020
Mikala Compton, New Braunfels Herald-Zeitung, New Braunfels, Texas, News Photographer, Nov/Dec 2019