By John Lehmann, 2013-15 NPAC President

Change seems to be the only constant in our industry and not surprisingly, the same holds true for the News Photographers Association of Canada.

At the 2013 Annual General Meeting held during the April conference in Calgary, I was elected to the NPAC board. I know this change was sudden and somewhat unexpected for many but as one of the original founders of this organization, I felt I could help refocus the direction of our group.

Looking ahead as president, I’d like to share three points that form the goal of making us a better organization. We need greater transparency within the organization, become a better advocate for Canadian photojournalists and be more mindful of our expenses.

Financially speaking, NPAC is in a grim state. The current board has reviewed the organization’s accounts spanning the past three years and revenues have steadily declined as expenses have increased. This trend has left the organization with a deficit of about $10,000. This may seem like an insurmountable amount of debt but I strongly believe that with a financial strategy in place and control of spending, we’ll get out of debt and be a more financially secure organization.
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Former Toronto Star photographer, Boris Spremo, was recently named to the Canadian News Hall of Fame.

A small gallery of his photos are on the Star’s photo blog.

Along with Spremo, Les Pyette, former Sun Media editor-publisher, will be officially inducted into the News Hall of Fame during an October 2013 ceremony in Toronto.

At least one other photographer is in the News Hall of Fame. Norman James was inducted in 1981 after a 40-year(?) career at the Toronto Star.

The muddy river of Canadian journalists’ rights and responsibilities just got a whole lot murkier with the arrest of Toronto Star journalist Alex Consiglio on June 2, 2013.

Consiglio is charged with the horrible crime of actually doing his job, in this case, photographing an unfolding news event at a Toronto GO transit station where police and transit officials were dealing with a transit officer who’d been injured.

To understand how we’ve come to this sorry state in our efforts to do our jobs, it helps to unravel what goes through the brains of the spin-makers who now project the faces of just about every corporate and public institution in North America.

You are not hearing from the transit board chairman or anyone else who actually is charged with making decisions of the kind mentioned here. Instead, you are hearing the voice of a media relations manager, a publicist, a public relations officer – or whatever other title they dream up for the individual who is the human shield between their organization and the media.
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