The Saturday Feature in The Herald in Jasper, Indiana, is 40 years old. John Rumbach, former co-publisher and editor of The Herald, is pleased with its longevity and its storied history. The coveted full-time internship program – two six-month internships per year – has been a jewel on many a resumé.
John believes that part of the reason the paper has experienced a slower readership decline than most others is due to the popularity of the Saturday Feature. Its consistently well-told in-depth stories mean a lot to the community because the stories are the community.
The Herald covers Dubois County and surrounding counties in southern Indiana and has been in the Rumbach family for 100 years this month. After 45 years, John retired on Jan. 1, but remains co-president. His son Justin Rumbach is the fourth generation to be publisher and editor.
John explains that the Saturday Feature has been successful due to the high-caliber photographers who produced high-quality storytelling.
“The newspaper is the beginning of the food chain for these photojournalists,” John said. “We train them and send them on. It has been self-perpetuating – once you had that reputation people wanted to keep working for you. We were doing things that other people were not.” John adds, “We set the tone that quality matters and talent follows it.”
Why black and white all these years? Two things:
“It’s simply logistics of the press,” John said. “There is no color on pages 3, 4, and 5. And some stories are just better in black and white. Kind of like the film ‘Roma.’ Color would get in the way of the flow of it. Moments can disappear in color.”
John initiated the process of the Saturday Feature and helped develop it with Alan Petersime, the first full-time staff photographer, in 1979. In a 2008 story in News Photographer magazine, John wrote that it was “born from an idea stolen at a (NPPA) Flying Short Course in 1977” when he saw a presentation about the Claremont, Calif., Courier’s dramatic display of picture stories on its front page.
“Once the culture was established that words and pictures were on equal footing and that we would be committed to storytelling in pictures and words – including in-depth pieces – then it was a matter of letting the talented journalists we were hiring do their thing. Not without occasional course corrections even to this day.”
Justin asked his now-retired dad to pass the torch of editing and layout of the Saturday Feature to chief photographer Sarah Ann Jump. The Herald has one chief photographer, one staff photographer and one six-month intern.
Typically Midwestern, John is humble about his extraordinary success. Asked if News Photographer could do a story about him, he predictably declined.
But many photojournalists had a lot to say about working in Jasper and alongside John. They describe his style perfectly and noted that the lessons learned in Jasper don’t stay in Jasper. And the pictures? They still resonate, too. Scroll down and read their stories.
Sometime in the '70s, John Rumbach had a vision for his family-owned newspaper, The Dubois County Herald. Let's take the chicken dinners, the check passings, the First Communions and the largest vegetables and turn them into storytelling opportunities. The Herald's Saturday Feature was born. Words and photos melding, both telling stories, each with unique insight. Stories of friends and neighbors, real people doing real things reflecting their community.
In 1979 I was hired as the first full-time photographer at The Herald. Through John's mentoring, I became a visual storyteller, a picture editor and most of all a member of the community. The collaboration of words and pictures was paramount for John, but more important was understanding the community, being part of the community, not as celebrity, but as an unimposing citizen who told stories.
John's work with The Kalish picture editing workshop, colleges and seminars boosts his commitment to sharing his knowledge. Through John's tutelage, hundreds of journalists, not only at The Herald, but across the U.S. have become better journalists, better storytellers and better community citizens.
Alan Petersime is from Gettysburg, Ohio, a town of 500. Worked in Wabash, Indiana, at the Wabash Plain Dealer newspaper from 1978-79 as a stringer photographer then moved to Jasper in 1979 as the first fulltime staff photograher. Moved to Marion, Indiana, in 1984 as staff photographer at the Marion Chronicle-Tribune and became photo editor in 1994. Moved to the Indianapolis Star in 1998 as photo assignments/picture editor/staff photographer. Retired in 2011. Currently an independent photojournalist.
John Rumbach gave us the time and space for producing the best photos possible, not just for Saturday Feature but also for daily work and sports. The Herald has a stellar reputation in the community due to the Rumbachs and this meant that the community trusted us. This built-in time and trust allowed us to be present for behind-the-scenes moments, ones that are increasingly off-limits to photographers. The Herald is an afternoon paper, which meant that we could stay for the end of sports games, especially tournament games, and we knew that those photos were often the ones that resonated most with our readers. John is the one that created that culture and emphasized that the best photo for a sports story might not be an action shot.
I was an intern at The Herald for the fall of 2013 and was a staff photographer in 2015-2016. I was the photo/video fellow for Maine Audubon and I work part time for the Portland Press Herald in Maine.
I proposed an essay on the woodworkers in the Dubois County-area furniture industry, whose products ran the spectrum from Jay Leno's desk to bedside tables in hotels. John didn't hesitate. I sent letters to maybe 10 area plants asking for a general tour and permission to come back to wander and make photographs. I met Frankie Taylor, above, during my tour of the DMI, Inc. facility in Huntingburg. I worked on this between other stories for more than a month and I believe it ended up running across seven pages. John encouraged us to run, with the only limit being our own creativity.
Tim Myers is a freelance designer and art director in Raleigh, N.C.
Aside from sharpening my pun game (John Rumbach is a master of puns), one of the biggest takeaways from my nearly nine years of working with John is the lesson of what is central to telling stories. On the surface, a story may be about a particular topic that is related to a social or political issue, but the key component to telling a good story is making the focus about people and their lives.
The Saturday Feature is more than 40 years worth of proof of this. The stories published in John’s time at The Herald have almost all been in Dubois County, Indiana, which is pretty phenomenal when you think about the volume and the depth of this body of work. This taught me that you don’t need to go to exotic locations to make interesting photographs and tell compelling stories. But telling those stories requires a high level of trust from your community. When you can engage your readers with their own personal stories, that trust comes and the doors open.
Dave Weatherwax is a producer at Kertis Creative in Lousiville, Kentucky.
In 1984 I was sports editor for a newspaper in Corydon, Indiana, when I heard John Rumbach, editor of The Herald in nearby Jasper, was looking for a photographer. I'd been shooting pictures between sports assignments and liked it, but had a very slim portfolio. I called John. The Herald had a massive appetite for pictures – daily news and features, sports, regular picture pages and the now-legendary Saturday Feature. The Herald then employed only one photographer. John took a risk by hiring me.
Everyone in the newsroom worked long, crazy hours. We were there by choice, learning, pushing each other, failing, trying again, arguing about stories we didn't understand, stressing out, playing. Jazzed after covering high school basketball, we tossed paper airplanes across the newsroom at 1 a.m. "Money For Nothing" blasted from a boombox. We were young and naive but John pushed us steadily toward his journalistic vision, one that asked big questions: What is this place called Jasper? What makes it special? And who are these people we call neighbors?
I learned patience. I learned to turn off the motor drive (ah, film days), to appreciate silence, the voices of others. I learned to recognize those human reveals photographers call "moments," though years passed before I realized them as more than elements driving a narrative. Life does that to you.
I'm now 59 and live in a community where Google and other high-tech companies thrive, yet people struggle with addictions and watch their sons and daughters march into uncertain futures. A gunman recently murdered 11 people at a local synagogue. Police killed an unarmed black student. Still, people celebrate graduations, births, sunny winter days. Last week I photographed a woman dancing in the street. I wonder, "Are we doing this right?" I ask as both citizen and journalist. The two are inseparable. This, too, I learned in Jasper.
Steve Mellon is a photographer at the Pittsburg Post-Gazette.
I learned by the questions he asked me. The first was always “What are you wanting to say with these pictures? What points do you want to make?” I’d list them off and then he’d group the pictures based on those themes, and from each pile, we would decide which image makes the point best. In the beginning, I wasn’t very clear on what I wanted to say with pictures, and the time spent in John’s office often helped me to see more clearly, to find connections to broader themes.
When I fell short, I knew what I had to do with the next story. Over time, I began shooting with those editing sessions in mind, not to find a formula, but to make sure I knew why I was pressing the shutter in certain instances.
For a story about a woman who cared for her husband with Alzheimer’s, I remember John saying, “This isn’t a story about Alzheimer’s. This is a story about wedding vows.” That set the tone for each of my visits with the couple.
I also learned a great deal watching John design the Saturday Feature. I could see how he would put pictures on the page to see how they played off one another. Sometimes, he would substitute a different photo in because visually it pulled things together. He also pointed out visual redundancies during edits, and from this, I made better lens choices while shooting stories.
When I am asked to edit a peer’s work, I find myself following the same logic. One of the things he said that stuck with me is “make your point once and move on.” It’s a line I find myself using when convincing someone to remove a redundant picture.
Dave Pierini is a freelance writer and photographer living in Minneapolis. I write about tech culture for the website Cult of Mac but I'm also the main photographer for the North News, a non-profit newspaper that covers North Minneapolis.
I remember nervously driving to the newspaper on the first day of my internship and walking up the stairs to the newsroom. There, I met a lovely woman who’d say “Hi” to me every day after that and went into the big glass office where the publisher sat. There sat John Rumbach.
My immediate first impression of him was calm, open, and kind. He had a quiet sense of authority that immediately made me feel comfortable. And in a twinkly-eyed way, he was very funny.
John became my compass. He cared deeply about the people I would meet on those Indiana roads: the farmer at the county fair, the years-long referee at the baseball field, the woman supporting herself by driving an overnight cab.
Every Saturday, with Tim Meyers, then the staff photographer, it was my job to fill The Herald’s pages with an intimate look at these people and their lives. I would pitch a story, or John would give me a tip, and I’d be off — shoot shoot shoot, develop in the dark, and make black-and-white prints in those plastic trays. I can still smell the fixer, and hear the rumble of the door and John’s footsteps as he came looking for the deadline prints: “Is it soup yet?” he’d say.
What I learned from John that summer impressed me deeply and has stayed with me for nearly three decades (I’m getting a little teary even writing this):
I learned how meaningful a life could be through work that is rooted in community and that looks deeply at what matters in peoples’ lives.
Ultimately, from John I learned this: that true north in this business is that our work is most fundamentally about and for the people we cover. It’s not about ourselves and our careers (I need to remind myself of that one) and that a person’s real character will always be felt by the people who work for and with them. ■
I live in Providence, Rhode Island, and I do projects that look into the notion of community, visibility, and equity. I have since had residencies in Newnan, Georgia, and Stanford University. The work in Georgia is about to be launched as a large-scale banner installation (pictured) in Newnan. The work from Silicon Valley was published as a book “Seeing Silicon Valley” in 2018 in France; the English edition is forthcoming.
I am incredibly grateful for my time at The Herald and John's dedication to building such a strong family-run community newspaper. I was an intern at The Herald during the first half of 2015. After my internship I was hired as a staff photographer and stayed for two years.
Working at The Herald and with John Rumbach taught me the importance of community journalism. Whether it is quick daily stories or more in-depth Saturday Features, The Herald consistently discovers new ways to share meaningful moments and stories from every corner of the community. My time at The Herald taught me to always stay curious and open to discovering something unexpected when I meet new people. I learned to always be patient and take the extra time to ask more questions. There are always people just down the street or around the corner from you with a story to tell. We often don't know all our neighbors and even the ones we do know might have a whole part of their lives that we are unaware of. Community journalism and the Saturday Feature is a way to spark connection and understanding, not just between strangers, but also friends and neighbors.
I am now a staff photographer at The Columbian in Vancouver, Washington.
What I learned from John Rumbach:
Telling the stories of your community in a respectful way means that you treat people as if they matter, because they do, and that you photograph people in a way that tells something true.
1) Stories that matter are all around you.
2) A photographer’s job is to find and tell stories that matter to the community.
2) Photograph who people are, not just what they do.
3) Say something true with your pictures, even if it is a small thing.
4) The community will tolerate difficult and painful stories if they also see that you pay attention to joy and success.
I was at The Herald 1993-96. I am a Professor of Practice at the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon. I continue to do documentary photography and make documentary films. My latest photo project is Black Soil, a 27-year project with black farm families in the Bootheel of Missouri — a project I started as a grad student at Missouri and just couldn’t stop working on over the years. The last of my films, "Blackfeet Flood," premiered at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival in January.
