Cher Phillips
Views on online media and journalismArchive for McIntosh
Public affairs photo: dealing with the dull factor
One of the problems with photos from a public affairs meeting is that they can be seriously boring. The McIntosh meeting photos I’ve taken in the past have been poor in quality due to light quality or vibration. My new camera solved both of those problems, for the most part.
What it doesn’t solve is the boring issue.
I found a useful tip a couple pages between last weeks readings in Kobre. The chapter was talking about meetings, and I couldn’t resist reading it. On page 51, there is a small graph about Washington Post photographer Ray Lustig noting that a wrinkled brow, a curled lip, hands and faces reveal emotions. I think we might have talked about hand movement in class, too. Or maybe I imagined that because I read it that morning.
Either way, when I was photographing the council meeting last Thursday night, I found myself waiting for officials to start moving their hands and for the emotional moments to come up in the meeting. If you wait long enough, someone will get angry, or forget that I’m there and start talking with his or her hands.
A long-standing issue in McIntosh remains how to control speeding. The speed limit in town is 20 mph. The town tried speed humps, but residents are still unhappy about how fast people travel on the main roads that intersect the highway.
In this photo, McIntosh Town Councilman Lee Deaderick suggests that the town just buy stop signs. Granted, you’d need a caption to explain this isn’t a high five.
Another point on page 51 of the Kobre book involves how news value can increase depending on who’s who and the personalities involved in the picture.
The context of this photo is what falls into the who’s who category of news value. To an outsider, it looks simple enough. In the forefront, LPA chairwoman Charlsie Stott advises the council her committee approved a rezoning application from June Glass, who is watching in the background. But what makes this photo ironic is that Stott and Glass strongly disagree on about every issue about the town, quite possibly the universe as well. Later in this very meeting, they interrupted council discussion arguing between themselves about how much Stott should have to pay for garbage pickup. Getting them together in one image agreeing that June’s land should be rezoned is something of a landmark moment.
On covering McIntosh… the Edna box and breaking the photo barrier
I’m a fan of Edna Buchanan.
I love her books and jokingly call them “reporter porn.” They’re mysteries where most of the time the reporter is the good guy, the hero or the heroine, the smart one who solves the mystery, gets the story, the girl or guy, escapes from the clutches of the bad guys and all around wins when they play by the rules of fair reporting and good ethics. Basically, reporter porn. Some of Carl Hiaasen’s books are the same but more kitschy and … lacking Buchanan’s tips.
One tip I picked up from Buchanan is to carry your tools in your car. Her character Britt Montero keeps a Miami city directory in her back seat, as well as a change of clothes and shoes.
Being computer geeks, you would think that we would be able to find ANY phone number online. When you are covering a town that’s circa 1880 and socially stuck in the 1960’s, folks give out their phone numbers out like this, “I’m at 3551.” In McIntosh, the 591 prefix is a given. My home number is 591-3551. (Don’t bother calling me though. I rarely answer and keep a landline for the sole purpose of having DSL.) McIntosh is a dinky little historic town. A large segment of the population consists of retirees. The town is so small that some people and businesses just don’t show up in Google searches. This presents a problem for me periodically.
So, I created an Edna Buchanan box for the backseat of my car. I keep a McIntosh area phone book in my car and in my office at UF.
I also keep in my Edna box: a camera tripod, a mic stand, phonebooks for McIntosh, Ocala and Gainesville, a Florida Sunshine Law manual, a copy of the McIntosh Land Development Code, a copy of the McIntosh Comprehensive Plan, extra pens, notebooks, batteries for my digital recorder and camera. I take my camera bag in and out of the car, because I don’t want the electronics in the heat, or to get stolen. This is Florida, after all.
I carry the camera tripod because my old digital camera had such a terrible vibration problem. This paid off for me once. Last December, I ran down to the little grocery store in McIntosh. While shopping, someone ran into the store and yelled for someone to call 911 because a car struck a man outside on U.S. 441. I was able to take pictures of this scene. It was just past dusk with my earthquake camera, so the images were pretty bad.
Ironically, some residents chastised me for posting them, even though I decided against running the image I had that was more of a close up. I was also caught in a tug of war between local residents who wanted me to post his name and residents who didn’t. One woman told me that if it was important enough to run his name, The Gainesville Sun would do it. The Sun never mentioned the accident, and I finally put the name in the comment section under discussion, where it would be less likely to show up in a Google search. While the town has done little about crosswalks at U.S. 441 as a result of the story, the broken street lamp directly over where the man had been hit was promptly fixed.
There are a number of reasons I’ve rarely used photos in the my blog. Some of them have been the negative reaction from the community. But the main reason is that my old camera took such horrible pictures. I bought a new Canon a week or so ago that I’m loving, which means I’m going to start posting more pictures in the McIntosh blog. We had a council meeting last night where I took a whole bunch of shots. Posting them means facing the sensitivity in the community, so I’m giving some thought today and this weekend on how to use them.
I’d love to read about what other reporting tips the rest of the class has like the Edna box.
Separating the Pros from the Rest of the Internet
My core objective in taking Journalist’s Toolkit is to better learn what separates the amateurs from the professionals.
I have a laundry list of practical and theoretical practices that I’d like to learn about collecting audio, photos and video. What I really want to walk away with is an understanding of how to produce professional, credible online news. Anyone with an Internet connection can put content out on the Internet. But that doesn’t make it professional journalism.
The first reason for wanting to understand this line in the sand is practical. I want to work in the field one day.
Another reason I would like to understand this line better is more personal. The process of collecting news to present in a blog has always felt shy of journalism to me, even though I do it myself on a regular basis.
For the last year or so, I’ve been keeping a hyperlocal blog on the municipal government in McIntosh, Florida called the McIntosh Mirror. I started the blog when there was great deal of angst in the community because residents didn’t understand what was going on with the town council. I used a blog as my venue for the sole reason that it was cheap, free and easy.
A year later, there is still a great deal of angst in the community. I’m not sure residents understand their town government any better. Readers in the comment sections can be vicious to each other and to me. What started out for me as a method of giving people a voice has had some unexpected results. A year ago, residents were turning up in record numbers to vote. This year, the town has had a hard time getting people to run for public offices in town. Some blame the blog. For these reasons, I spend a lot of time thinking about what my role as a community journalist is and should be.
The McIntosh Mirror has been an incredible learning experience, but the blog itself was not something I’ve kept up as part of an academic project. For that reason, it’s something that I am very alone in doing. I rarely get to talk about the McIntosh blog with other people who study online media academically.
Blogging is intensely connected to community and that’s one thing I’d like from this class blog. I would like to build a community of other people like myself who have an academic and professional interest. I’d like to post about some of the issues that come up with the McIntosh blog.
Finally, I’m hoping to finally produce decent photos. I’ve taken two photojournalism classes as an undergrad. I never could get film to perform for me. I need to be able to make more mistakes and see them as I go along than film allows. I just bought a new camera, and I’m hoping to jump that hurdle this semester.
