Im hoping students are waiting til the last minute to get everything just right...
Taras tells me the number of submissions was a dozen,
better than four but hugely disappointing!
Maybe newspaper photojournalism is or has died!
When you want to build a ship, don’t start by gathering wood, cutting boards and distributing the work, but awaken in men a desire for the vast and endless sea.
At the Star, for example, an intern student reporter needs only the clothes on their back. But an intern student photographer needs full camera gear, laptop, software, smartphone and a car. Yet both interns get paid the same rate (I stand to be corrected here). I know the photo department has little to do with this and it has to fight to even have an internship.
If staff reporters can use taxis, why can't interns? Professional news photographers in some cities use only public transit and taxis. Why not in Toronto?
During the summer months, most university and college residences are empty. Can a newspaper work out a deal to have the interns live in a nearby residence? This would be cheaper than a hotel or apartment and better than a room in someone's basement.
Remember that you're hiring an intern for their promising talent, not for what they own. If you supply your staffers with gear then why not be fair and treat the intern the same? After all, you're expecting the intern to do the same work.
What other job at a big company requires that you bring all your own tools?
Move into the 21st century and offer e-Internships or i-Internships?
The requirement for a short video was cute but other than acting, what job requires you to test for the part? McDonalds doesn't ask for test burger flips. Makeup artists aren't asked for test eyeliner and lipstick. Do reporters have to submit test stories? Do editors have to edit some test articles?
If I was in charge of a newspaper, I would ask potential interns: If you were to work for my newspaper this summer, what five stories would you like to cover? What's the story, why is it important to our readers and what's the best way to visually report it?
Good ideas are better than good technique.
A reporter just has to be a journalist and that's easy. A photographer has two jobs - photographer and journalist - and this is, or at least it should be, the future of newspapers.
We've been communicating with video (moving pictures) for ~120 years. We've been using text for ~5,000 years (although early "words" were images). We've been communicating with images for ~45,000 years. Guess how our brains work.
Quote from: Warren TodaAt the Star, for example, an intern student reporter needs only the clothes on their back. But an intern student photographer needs full camera gear, laptop, software, smartphone and a car. Yet both interns get paid the same rate (I stand to be corrected here). I know the photo department has little to do with this and it has to fight to even have an internship.
But aren't these all things that students and recent graduates need once they finish school anyways?
Im my case, the big between first and second year at Loyalist purchase wasn't gear, though I did invest in some, it was a car.
Though with insurance rates the way they are, that might be the biggest expense, maybe more than the vehicle!
Quote from: Warren TodaIf staff reporters can use taxis, why can't interns? Professional news photographers in some cities use only public transit and taxis. Why not in Toronto?
This rarely happens, cab slips are rarely seen in the newsroom anymore!
Quote from: Warren TodaRemember that you're hiring an intern for their promising talent, not for what they own. If you supply your staffers with gear then why not be fair and treat the intern the same? After all, you're expecting the intern to do the same work.
What other job at a big company requires that you bring all your own tools?
We do have some gear available for the intern, I'm not sure what is in the cupboard.
We are hiring an intern based on their promising talent, that we have identified through images, moving and still, that they have captured with equipment that they already have.
Again, throwing back to my old days, when I did my internship at the London Free Press and the Star my kit was a Canon A1E, Canon EOS 630, 80-200mm, 24 f2.8, and one strobe!
My summer at the Star paid for a laptop and film scanner to set me up for freelancing.
Chef's, mechanics, carpenters, all have their own tools!
In the past when I was on the screening panel and the requirement was a portfolio we would get between 50 to 80 portfolios.
But a bunch of those portfolios were
- student portfolios where you could see that they were not shooting anything outside their assignments
- portfolios where over half their images were from the most recent protest/event de jour to bum their image numbers up to over 10.
- portfolios that were travelogues of some trip to somewhere exotic, but no images from Canada
At the end of the process we would end up with a dozen of so serious portfolios
So if "the assignment" helped weed out those aforementioned portfolios and identify serious candidates, maybe that was a good thing.
Quote from: Warren TodaIf I was in charge of a newspaper, I would ask potential interns: If you were to work for my newspaper this summer, what five stories would you like to cover? What's the story, why is it important to our readers and what's the best way to visually report it?
Good ideas are better than good technique.
I do like your idea about having the applicant present several ideas about stories.
I think that is something everyone who has an interview should be prepared to present.
It was a question I was asked in my interview.
I think it is also important to irons in the fire on at least one of the story ideas too.
Because once you start at the paper you will be hitting the ground running.
But if a paper gets only a dozen or fewer applicants then something is broken.
If you have to pay for your own work-related repairs, why put your gear or car at risk?
Does any newspaper insure its gear or is it too expensive even for them?Funny story, at the Star we have no specific insurance on gear, but we found out a few years ago that we were covered under a different policy that the company has. The deductable? $10,000!
Most jobs don't require you to own a car plus thousands of dollars worth of camera gear. It's a catch-22 thing: you need a job so you can buy the gear but you can't get a job unless you already own the gear.There lies the dilemma.
Since numbers are down, do you fault the newspapers, the students, the schools, the economy?
I am surprised each year how numbers of people applying are slipping. There are fewer summer jobs out there, I would expect the numbers to climb as people try and get their foot in the door.I'm surprised too.
The most interesting thing I find is how few first year students apply. Just having your work seen, building a relationship, showing progressing each time your portfolio viewed. That alone is worth applying.
In Prince George, I have seen newsrooms everywhere shrink as, like the CBC, people are expected to do more with less. I have seen many talented people parachute out of journalism to jobs elsewhere. As one former newsroom director told me, she was making barely more than if she were to take a job at Dairy Queen, and she wasn’t sure it was worth it anymore. Being a journalist has become akin to a backpack trip around the world: something relatively-well-off people do in their twenties before getting a real job.
forgoing a newspaper internship because they want to do doc work is short sighted imo.Fred watching what goes on, there may be a feeling that "doc work" is the only "real" work, one reason is that a lot of the routine work done in the past is now given to reporters with point and shoots or smart phones. In the past few years, with Northern Gateway and LNG the news here, while I do get wire and newspaper assignments and staff photogs show up from time to time, most of the reporters including some from large papers who come here simply shoot with their phones and those images run. (Of course they missed the better shots you get with long lenses, but I get the feeling their managers don't really care)
I hope that many of my fellow classmates and future students embrace the advisory board...
Some classmates of mine have decided that documentary is more their thing and don't really have a lot of interest in doing your typical daily newspaper work.
I hope that many of my fellow classmates and future students embrace the advisory board and get their foot in the door with all the editors so that when they do go out in the world they have a good foundation to work off.