Her post is worth a read if you’re in that same stage of life as Serena and I, emerging journalists in a time when our field is rapidly evolving.

I’ve been posting on the Meridian Collective blog for a while now, so in case you’ve missed it, you can enjoy a whole backlog of my posts that you’ll find only on there and not here.  Sorry!

Will Parson Photography on Facebook

I just spent some serious time on Facebook, something I rarely do.  I made myself some fan pages and nabbed my own username:  facebook.com/willparson.

Here are the fan pages I just made:

For my photography:  Will Parson Photography on Facebook

For Meridian Collective:  Meridian Collective on Facebook

For Team Great Job:  Team Great Job! on Facebook

Anyone remember when it was The Facebook and no one referred to using it as social networking?  Back in the day, circa July 2004, I first joined The Facebook to find friends before I went off to my freshman year in college  (as I was deathly afraid of having to sit alone at lunch).  Now that I don’t use it often enough to keep up with all the new features, that feels like so long ago…

I remember some nice photo hacks from the earlier days of Facebook, like realizing that only the width of a profile photo was constrained, so that if you uploaded a jpeg that was, say 150 x 1500 pixels, your photo would drag on forever on whatever page it was displayed on.  Cool huh!?!  We were so crazy back then.  And I remember being able to upload an animated GIF and have a moving profile photo.  Ah, yes, those were the days.

Photo by Will Parson

I’m pleased to announce I took home two awards and an honorable mention at the 2009 San Diego County Fair Photojournalism Exhibition.  “Freegans” won second place in the photo essay category, and “PBR Rodeo” won third place in the same category.  “High Tide at Scripps Beach,” seen above, received an honorable mention in the Documentary category.  See the complete list of winners here.

This was my first experience entering the SD fair exhibition, and I’m excited to have my work displayed alongside seasoned staffers at the San Diego Union-Tribune and North County Times newspapers.

Granted, SDNN has worked out some of the kinks.  They recently surpassed local investigative journalism site Voiceofsandiego.org – a site completely dedicated to local issues – in monthly visitors.  My initial reaction was to guess that reaching this milestone has less to do with being dominant on the hyper-local front, as their announcement claims, and more to do with the fact that SDNN runs AP stories and Voice of San Diego doesn’t.  But, I am pleased today to see an SDNN homepage devoid of nationally syndicated stories, and dominated by original SDNN content.  It seems AP stories are on the backburner at SDNN; you have to go to the AP section just to see the headlines.  So my question for SDNN now is whether running AP stories has actually given them a boost, or if it has been worth it to pay for expensive syndicated stories that can be found on a hundred other newspaper websites just as easily.  Personally, I’d prefer it if SDNN ditched their AP subscription and used to money to pay for investigative reporting akin to Voice of San Diego.

Though I am optimistic, a disappointing update to the hyper-local content saga is this recent outreach effort by SDNN soliciting content from San Diego citizens.  Posed as a contest, it tries to play off an abysmal fee – $25 a story – as some sort of fun prize for giving SDNN your work.  That’s IF they decide your story is one of the best five they receive in a given week.  And just look at the terms of service: when someone submits their work to SDNN they are supposed to choose one of three license agreements.  It’s not clear which one is required to actually be paid for a story, but can you imagine submitting a story for free under an exclusive license in any circumstance?  That would mean that without any compensation, SDNN could have the right not only to publish your work, but transfer or sell that work to someone else.

I think this is a terrible way to solicit the community for stories.  Usually the ‘prize’ for a contest is a considerable chunk of change, not a meager four cents a word.  The five best weekly stories from all of San Diego are worth $25 each?  How am I supposed to interpret that?  Why don’t I just head to best of Craigslist to see what’s up?

This is the same devaluation of content I see in SDNN’s use of courtesy photos over hired photographers.  A growing trend among smaller community newspapers and publications (which as a freelance photographer has made me bitter if you haven’t noticed already) is to use mediocre photos for free rather than pay for quality images.  I hope that with this call for submissions, SDNN isn’t expanding this to include mediocre writing as well.  What a horrible precedent to set as a young publication that has just overcome the in-depth reporting of voiceofsandiego.org in terms of web visitors:  that the winning model is broad, shallow coverage and not in-depth, significant investigative reportage.

Anyway, I hate ending things on a down note, especially since its the summer and business is picking up for yours truly.  I spent most of this post complaining about SDNN trying to attract cheap, mediocre content, but at least their site is getting to be distinctly original and not just another newspaper site.  I even see hints of the Daily Beast‘s style of adept aggregation.  I’m optimistic that SDNN will continue to get their shit together.

Photoshelter has been sounding their big round SEO horn the last couple days, and I can’t believe I was letting myself go through life with a score of just 42 out of 100 points according to their SEO Grader. I downloaded their cookbook, followed their instructions, and I’m happy to say that my SEO score is now a manly and commanding 92 points. If my understanding of Search Engine Optimization is correct, you can now search for “Waxed Mustache” and my site is the first one listed.

The picture I chose to illustrate this post is my most popular photo on Flickr in terms of views.  As I sit here writing this post, it has been seen 4,676 times since I took it with my very first digital camera in 2004.  It is perhaps an example of good SEO in and of itself.  Are people drawn to it because of its magnificent composition, or because I so aptly labeled it with its subject, the world’s largest horse?

In any case, I hope that some of its hit-grabbing properties somehow ooze onto this blog.  I feel like I’m writing in my diary here.  Comments anyone?

The San Diego News Network homepage showed a "BETA 2.8" version on March 18, 2009.

Three days before the San Diego News Network’s site went live, the last printed edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer marked the end of 146 years of delivering news via smashed-up trees.  Naturally, my questions abound for the new venture; how does it plan to succeed besides saving money on pulp, and what role will it assign to still photography?

One day before SDNN arrived, a tiny tumult of Twitter tweets is the result of SDNN’s delayed arrival – a message on the SDNN homepage heralded a March 18 release date but the day came and went without a launch.  In fact, every single mention of SDNN I’ve heard so far has come from online sources.

On March 20, a message on the SDNN Twitter feed played coy, hinting at a soft launch later that day.  This, along with an outlet on their site for user-generated content, left me wondering whether this new network will try to maintain a line of more intimate communication with its demographic.

My first impressions of the site are positive.  At first glance the front page looks like any traditional newspaper’s homepage, though it is a lot less cluttered.  But, clicking on stories shows a dedication to incorporating audio slide-shows into its feature articles.  I am glad to see that they have adopted the Soundslides software for their embedded multimedia.

Despite the contributions of plenty of writers, I’ve had trouble finding photography done by anyone other than the visuals editor, Don Kohlbauer, who lent a solid audio slideshow about urban farming to one of SDNN’s first feature stories, or the multimedia editor, Steven Bartholow, who shot stills of a prostitute through the back window of the “look out” car for an early article.  I hope their list of photographers grows as their site works out the kinks.  I can put up with Voice of San Diego only having one photographer (Sam Hodgson), since they only have a handful of reporters anyway, but I really want to see strong original photojournalism from a site that claims to be the future of news at a time when newspapers are on their way out.

At least a couple blogs have reported on the collective trend.  APhotoEditor touches on the goal of comaraderie that is behind many collectives here.  And here he has compiled a massive list of photo collectives.  And PDN has just started a series of guest posts by the members of Luceo Images on what goes into forming a collective.

I believe our collective – yet-to-be-named – will be unique for a number of reasons, the synergy of photos and writing being the first and foremost.  I also welcome the camaraderie that we will enjoy; though, as a solitary freelancer I’ve experienced a wonderful amount of selflessness and generosity from other individual photographers.  Regardless, I plan to use our group’s united power to crush all other collectives along with whoever else may stand in our way and bend them to our will.  Overlord Collective has a ring to it, don’t you think?

Keith Harmon Snow is a writer, journalist and photographer who has a massive body of work spanning over a decade investigating war crimes, genocide, crimes against humanity, and environmental disasters.  He also swam across La Jolla Cove the other morning, recently traversed Mongolia with a bicycle, and somehow didn’t lose his voice after three hours of illuminating discussion of the atrocities happening today in Congo and elsewhere.  The visual story he tells with his photographs is enough to impress you on its own.

His talk last night was aimed at white-owner plantation slavery in Congo, and titled, “The Courage of the Congolese People.”  Whatever your views, Snow tells an interest story, and I think the most important thing to take away from the event wouldn’t be conviction, but awareness.

If you’re in San Diego tonight, you have a chance to hear Snow discuss a related topic: “the open policies and hidden agendas of ‘humanitarian’ agencies, non-government organizations, so-called “peacekeeping” missions, and the corporations and individuals behind them”.

You can check out his website, full of stories and photos, at www.allthingspass.com.

In the last couple days I’ve gone through my website at www.willparson.com and made some changes.  This nothing unusual – I’m always tweaking my portfolios – so why am I making a post about it?

Because I’m done wasting my time making ‘tweaks’ and am working on getting some new projects up and running.  The next update I make will be a much bigger one.

The photo above isn’t one of these new projects, but I found it while organizing some scans for a collection that should be on my website in the next couple of days.

Stay Tuned.

President Barack Obama meets with White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel in the Oval Office at the White House on his first day at his new office. (White House photo by Pete Souza / January 21, 2009)

The Associated Press is reporting that three major media outlets are refusing to distribute White-House provided photos of Obama on his first day because the media is traditionally allowed access to the Oval Office, and that the photos amount to a visual press release.

It looks like the Chicago Tribune had no qualms, though, and ran a story with a photo by official White House photographer Pete Souza.  Obama was lauded earlier this month for Souza’s appointment, and the NPPA’s report noted the crucial condition that his coverage serve as a record of history for future generations, and not just another communications outlet of the new administration.

So, it is especially surprising that it is Souza’s work that is getting this criticism, given his enumerated role as visual historian.

A false first step perhaps.  I hope we don’t see more instances of the Obama administration forgoing the media for its own communications.  It’s great that he wants to speak directly to the people, but no matter how transparent Obama manages to be with his many-headed media machine, independent journalism is irreplacable.