A speaker emphasizes his point with a hammer during a rally to support dairy farmers in Manchester, Iowa
A project I worked on last week reminded me of work we were doing in the late 1990′s and early 2000′s with story telling on the web. Before I tell you about that, let me explain how I got to Manchester, Iowa for rally to support dairy farmers last Saturday.
The work of college faculty isn’t just about standing at the head of a class. In professional terms, faculty members on most college campuses have three components to their job description: teaching, service, and research. There are many nouns for these primary responsibilities. There are also a myriad of way to define and divide a faculty member’s time spent on these activities. This is collectively called the “workload policy” which is something similar to the Loch Ness creature and Sasquatch…a great deal of fun to discuss and debate, but no one has actually seen one.
Service is work a faculty member does, often at no fee, for the community in which he or she lives and contributes. They become the public scholar, sharing their expertise with those who want and need it to make a strong an move vibrant community.
If you follow farm and consumer news, you are aware of a very difficult time in dairy farming. As I reviewed my Twitter account last week, I learned of Farm Aid’s search for volunteers to help at a rally. So I reached out to the people of Farm Aid and offered to help them document the efforts in Manchester to bring attention to the problems facing dairy farmers in Iowa and the US.
Self serving disclosure: Not only is this “service” but it is providing background for an elective I am co-developing with colleagues from several disciplines tentatively called “We Are What We Eat: Nutrition, Policy, and the Public Health of America’s Diet”. That elective deserves a post of it’s own.
A mother fans her daughter following surgery in Yerevan, Armenia in this 1999 photo. It is one of the last film images I shot on mission trips.
The project in Manchester was easy, compared to what we did in 1999. I needed to shoot the images and hand them off or post them to Flickr. There is even a coffee shop with free wi-fi in town. I was shooting with Nikon D1 – a gift from a friend. It took me back the early days, shooting from Armenia with Tom Burton, and the first time I saw a Nikon D1 digital camera. After shooting with it for a day, in 1999, I never returned to film except as a back up. Photography for me had changed.
I also recalled going into countries with only the hope of a modem line and access to AOL as a way to publish our work in real time. Huy Nguyen’s photo of me in surgical garb, listening to the modem sounds on an Apple G3 Powerbook reminds me of that November, being in Ha Noi on election night 2000 and trying to explain to our Vietnamese hosts what was going on in American politics. Later that week, we were evicted from our hotel room a few days early to make room for the secret service and President’s Clinton’s entourage.
Thinking of those trips, and how we crated remote live Web reporting, and producing some projects for clients like MAG - the Mines Advisory Group featuring the brilliant lens work of Sean Sutton, there is still something powerful and immediate about Web documentary making. It is even more powerful with the addition of so many new storytellers. it required a strong edit and a producer who can focus the message. That’s what I’ll be doing with my colleagues as we put together our elective….the subject of my next post.
As we’ve collectively watched the changes in our economy, one industry that is being hit hard is journalism. Especially hard, for me, is learning of the Rocky Mountain News closing.
I had the opportunity produce a feature about the RMN photojournalism team in one of the most difficult moments of their history: the 1999 shootings on the high school campus at Columbine. That multimedia project, Covering the War At Home was produced in cooperation with other digital pioneers Dirck Halstead and David Snyder and is still live — in its 1999 format — at The Digital Journalist. The RMN coverage of Columbine earned the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography in 2000.
To understand the personal impact of this one paper’s closing, please take 20 minutes to watch:
My cell phone lit up with this text message at 10:45 today (11/4/07). The sender was Sue Ellen Ruggles, shown in this photo I took of her holding a mirror up for a young cleft lip patient to see his natural smile for the first time.
The photo was taken in Villahermosa, Mexico in 2000. According to news reports, today the city and State of Tabasco has 800,000 homeless and maybe 150,000 in shelters due to flooding and rain. Potable drinking water has been returned to approximately 30 percent of the area.
Here is Des Moines, a city about the same size as Villahermosa, we were flooded and without fresh water in 1993. Villahermosa, at an average of 10 meters above sea level, will have significant recovery issues
Sue Ellen is reaching out, I am reaching out, and soon, others of our teams will be reaching out to see the best way we can provide aid or be a conduit for aid.
When I left Villahermosa the first visit, I wrote this reflective piece about life’s questions.
Has the media pounded this topic into the ground yet? Do you remember what happened today in 1997? Do you remember what you were doing?
I remember because it changed the way I tell stories. And probably served as a role model for the way others tell stories, too.
Mark Hertzberg broke the news via an email discussion group for the National Press Photographers Association. I was a member and when his email popped up around 8:30, I read with great interest:
Subject: AP/Princess Di accident and Paparazzi
From: Hertzberg
Date: 1997/08/30
Message-ID:
Sender: NPPA Discussion List
Comments: ********************************************************
Reply-To: Hertzberg
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.nppa-l
One posting, two subjects, to save bandwith:
1)
>I had a hiatus from daily PJ'ing for a few years, but back then AP paid us
>for submissions. Is this still the case? or only for freelancers and not
>newspaper staffers? Some photogs say yes, others say no. All I know is that
>I ain't getting paid for stuff I send from my paper.
The policy varies from state to state. Wisconsin does not pay. Contact your
local bureau photographer or bureau chief to find out more.
2) It's about 8:30 p.m. central time and CNN is reporting a serious
accident involving Princess Diana in a tunnel near the Seine in Paris. The
gentleman she has been recently romantically linked to was apparently
killed in the crash. A bodyguard/chauffeur was apparently killed, as well.
What is going to be interesting for us to follow in our profession
is that the CNN anchors are questioning tourist eyewitnesses about the
possibility of paparazzi on motorcycles being in the area. They want to
know if they were indeed following the princess, and, if so, if they have
have been the possible cause of the crash. An American tourist says a
photographer with a "professional camera" was on the scene in "five
seconds."
Mark Hertzberg
In the aftermath, the idea of paparrazi and photojournalists being one in the same created an opportunity to tell a story about life as a daily photojournalist working in a community newspaper. The result was Behind the Viewfinder – A Year in the Life of Photojournalism. The photojournalists, through me as editor, wrote journals — early blogs — about their daily work and life. These increbly talented individuals brought digital storytelling on the web to a never before seen level.
Later this year, the site will include a recorded interview of the people who participated in the project. The interview, recorded in 1999, has been reedited from it’s original public radio broadcast.
F.R. "Fritz" Nordengren is Assistant Professor at Des Moines University where he supervises health care administration graduate student capstone projects.
He is a President of the Iowa Food Systems Council to recommend policy, research and program options for an Iowa food system which supports healthier Iowans, communities, economies and the environment.
Nordengren is an award winning producer, a graduate health care educator, and a small farmer & rancher
My cell phone lit up with this text message at 10:45 today (11/4/07). The sender was Sue Ellen Ruggles, shown in this photo I took of her holding a mirror up for a young cleft lip patient to see his natural smile for the first time.
