Archive for New York City
Spring Semester Prep 2012 at the Columbia Graduate School
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New York Times staffers present "A Year at War"
I enjoyed the great fortune of attending Spring Semester Prep Day 2012 today at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism as a guest of Prof. Sree Sreenivasan, Dean of Student Affairs. This annual mini-conference of academic, career, writing and reporting tips and advice is one of “Dean Sree’s” innovations and welcomes students back from the holiday break before the semester formally begins.
Concurrent events and aggressive students networkers kept me from attending every event, and after the first panel I noted that the busy social media backchannel had already burned halfway through my iPhone battery.
The program opened with a panel featuring the New York Times staffers who produced “A Year at War,” a dynamic interactive story about the ongoing deployment of troops to Afghanistan — and winner of the 2012 duPont-Columbia Award for Digital Reporting.
After lunch, “Rock Center” executive producer Rome Hartman talked about what it’s like to launch a new primetime newscast.
Students in my Peace and Conflict Journalism course at Swarthmore — and journalism students everywhere — are now preparing pitches for stories to cover this semester and Hartman was full of actionable advice.
Hartman says 100 stories or more are pitched for each one that you see on “Rock Center” and that there “are a million reasons to say no.” He looks for “brevity and clarity” in a pitch “in two paragraphs that get me interested.” He also looks for passion and says it should “come through that you’re jazzed.”
Hartman avoids the familiar and likes stories “that take people places they wouldn’t otherwise go” or stories that deliver a “snapshot that illuminates a larger truth.”
I also dropped in on an expert panel called ‘Everything you need to know about business reporting if you aren’t taking a Spring business reporting course” and “Writing – and Publishing – Your First Book” with Prof. Sam Freedman, who runs Columbia’s legendary Book Writing Seminar.
I am rushing back to Philly for our 10th annual Philadelphia Conference ”Year in Pictures” event but NBC chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel was scheduled to speak at Columbia this evening and students are planning gather again for a conversation with Lara Logan of CBS news on Friday night.
Above all, it’s hard to ignore the energy, optimism and enthusiasm among the students at Columbia, absolutely undeterred but the economic impediments confronting most traditional media companies. The place just rocks.
If you would like to get a glance at this vibrant community, it’s still not too late to register for the Columbia School of Journalism’s Social Media Weekend on January 27th through 29th: http://bit.ly/smwknd
Reporting from Ground Zero
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So here’s the 9/11 truth, at least when it comes to how I got to make pictures at Ground Zero on September 11th. It took me 12 hours to get from Philadelphia to midtown Manhattan, by train, sometimes hiking and even hitchhiking.
I was exhausted in every sense, it seemed like every path was blocked, and I found myself turning back, surrendering to the thought of a hotel room in Times Square with a shower and a king size bed.
I thought I might try to get in again on the 12th, but we now know that a complete federal lockdown was in progress, with National Guard troops on the perimeter and only FEMA photographers permitted inside – for the next year.
But no sooner had I turned back when I ran into Chris Brennan. His face said “How could you?” – and he shamed me into taking “one more shot.”
About two hours later, by the end of the longest day of my life, Chris and I would be among the very, very small number of journalists who saw Ground Zero after the smoke cleared enough to breathe but before the barbed wire went up the next day.
His remarkable performance deserved more attention then and there but much of his reporting was lost in the chaos of the newsroom that day.
Finally, we have a chance to hear his story - beginning at my expense, however truthfully.
9/11 gallery talk
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I feel honored to have been invited to spend September 11th lecturing on one of my photos from 2001 in this incredible exhibit at The Hyde Collection in Glens Falls, NY. Thanks to Cathy DeDe, Managing Editor of The Chronicle in Glens Falls for this article posted Thursday (1,2).
EXHIBITION: New York, New York! The 20th Century
Posted by: | CommentsThe Hyde Collection introduces its major summer exhibition –New York, New York! The 20th Century, from the collection of the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida.
Artists represented in this exhibition include Berenice Abbott, Diane Arbus, George Bellows, Stuart Davis, Andreas Feininger, Childe Hassam, Edward Hopper, Reginald Marsh, and Jim MacMillan’s moving photograph of the World Trade Center on September 12, 2001.
New York, New York! The 20th Century
June 11, 2011 – September 17, 2011
Ground Zero: Then and Now
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I was in New York yesterday and the bin Laden news prompted me to take my first walk around Ground Zero in perhaps a couple of years. I stopped at many of the locations I had photographed on 9/11 and took new pictures with my iPhone.
In the top photo, FDNY firefighters carry a body into the lobby of the Dow Jones Building at the World Financial Center, which was being used as a temporary morgue late on the 11th. Yesterday, it was shiny and clean again.
For the most part, the visit was a cathartic experience, and it was good to see so much progress at last, but some of the commercial advertising nearby was still hard to swallow. I understand the appeal of carrying on with business as usual, but this will always be a sacred place for me.
I will post some more photos in the coming days.
