A Photo Finish at the Sun Times?

Chicago Sun Times (Photo credit: stu_spivack)

The Chicago Sun Times recently and suddenly laid off all 28 people in its full-time photography staff.  This included photographers and editors for its flagship paper and all of its suburban papers.

My first reaction was how could that only be 28 people?  To cover all of Chicagoland?  Including the suburbs?

My second reaction was this must be the beginning of the end for a once venerable major market newspaper.  How long can the Chicago Sun Times last without photographers and photo editors?  After all, if a picture is worth a thousand words, reporters are going to have to write a lot more to make up for missing photos.  Right?

Not so, says the leadership at the Sun Times.  Freelancers and reporters will provide plenty of photos, they say.  Plus, the move was precipitated by a shift to more video content for its online presence.

So, in reality, this move is the start of a new beginning for the newspaper that started in Chicago almost 170 years ago.  This move should be seen as a bold move into the brave, sorta new world of online journalism.  This is a move forward; a positive future-affirming strategic step.  So says the leadership of the Sun Times Media Group, the Sun Times parent organization.

As a subscriber of two daily and two weekly newspapers (not the Sun Times though because they stopped delivering where I live many years ago), I hope they are right.  

As a believer in the importance of having multiple journalistic voices in a community, I hope they are right.

As a lover of photography, including photojournalism, I suspect that they are wrong.  I am afraid that the Sun Times leadership will soon find the power that amazing photography has to draw readers and attention to their publication.  And that the lack of it will make it easier to ignore their publication.  I suspect they will learn that there are some stories that need to be told pictorially to really have an impact.  I worry that other newspapers will follow suit and will count on writers, presumably with their cellphones, to snap pictures while they are trying to get a story, forcing them to do neither as well as they could.

I hope that this is just a strategic move and that the Sun Times continues their long and fruitful contribution to Chicago journalism.  I worry that this is another sign of the slow, creeping demise of print journalism.

I can just picture it.

Related articles

• Photos: Protest over fired photo staff at Chicago Sun-Times
• Chicago Sun-Times lays off entire photography staff

Thumbs Up for Critics...Sort Of

"No one has ever built a statue to a critic, it's true. On the other hand, it's only the people with statues that get pooped on by birds flying by."           Seth Godin

Few of us set out to be critics.   Rarely does a critic make it on anyone's list of most admired people or historical figures we'd like to have dinner with.  Critics are seen as living off of the efforts of others.

Yet we pay attention to them.  We talk about how many stars a movie got or whether new software was highly rated or panned.  We read the books they recommend and buy tickets to the plays they admire.

I think that there is an important role in society for quality critiquing of our arts and entertainment.  First, it helps us sort through the endless stream of options to identify the handful of things we can reasonably expect to enjoy.  Second, quality criticism can help us develop our critical viewing and reading skills.  Reading solid, thoughtful critiques helps us to learn to look for the subtext and symbolism, the context and the character arcs of more subtly crafted films or books.  Third, critiques provide us with the context and language to talk about the arts and entertainment we enjoy. I seriously doubt that many of us would be talking about sweep shots and casting coups if they weren't first discussed by a critic.

The challenge for critics is that the rug has been pulled out from under them.

Siskel and Ebert probably would have had a harder time getting started professionally today, because the role of critic has been democratized.  It is easy these days for any user or viewer to weigh in on what they think of a movie, or an app, or a product.  There are whole businesses that are built around consumer reviews; businesses such as Angie's List, which shares customer reviews of service companies.

As critiquing has gained prominence in our society, the role of critic seems to have diminished.  Does the professional critic serve a purpose in a world when you can get the average rating of thousands of Amazon participants.  Does a critic, despite facing competition from her very audience, contribute anything to the general conversation?

I feel that professional critics do serve an important purpose.  That purpose is not in the ratings they give, but in the explanations that support those ratings.  Critics give a context to their ratings which makes them far more valuable.  To learn that a movie only got two stars is one thing.  To learn that it got two stars because it has a clown in it and the reviewer hates clowns gives you a whole other perspective; especially if you also have strong feelings about clowns!

However, critical context can be found many places as well.  Searching "movie blogs" on Bing generates almost 3 billion results.  I am pretty sure a few of them are done by amateurs.

In the end, I think the role of the professional critic is going through the same transition as the role of the professional journalist.  The rules are changing and the successful critics will change with them.  Just this week, the Chicago Sun Times fired all of their staff photographers.  They cited the need to increase the use of video as the reason.  I suspect the need to control fixed costs also played a role in the decision.  If major market newspapers are counting on freelance photographers to meet their needs, how far behind will wire service or crowd sourced critics be?

Perhaps the best roadmap was laid out by the recently deceased Roget Ebert. Not satisfied with being just a print journalist, he joined forces with the film critic from a rival newspaper and became a broadcast star.  When cancer took his voice, he made sure he still had one by moving into social media.  As you can see from the article below, even death hasn't stopped Mr. Ebert.  His site lives on, providing film criticism and reviews.

Today's critic needs to leverage what ever credibility and audience she has into whatever media and format is looking for content.  As so often happens, quality work will rise to the top and find its audience.



Related articles

• The Critic Stumbles
• Roger Ebert's Site Gets a Major Redesign, Will Continue to Feature Reviews from Contributors

Leadership Lost

"Being a leader is like being a lady.  If you have to go around telling people you are one, you aren't."
-  Margaret Thatcher, 1925-2013

 "I begin to feel like most Americans don't understand the First Amendment, don't understand the idea of freedom of speech, and don't understand that it's the responsibility of the citizen to speak out."           - Roger Ebert, 1942-2013

In the last two week we lost two groundbreaking leaders.  Both of them cleared new territory for those who came after them.  Both of them paid little heed to what had been done before but rather looked forward and acted on the possibilities of what could be.  I am talking about Margaret Thatcher, the former Prime Minister of Great Britain, and Roger Ebert, the film critic for the Chicago Sun Times.

I am pretty sure that there won't be too many articles or blogs that will discuss the passing of both of these two rather unique individuals.  However, to my mind, they had much in common.  Both Thatcher and Ebert broke new ground in their respective fields.  Both were divisive leaders, loved by some, despised by others.

Whatever you thought of her politics, it is hard to deny that Margaret Thatcher was a leader.  The first and only woman to serve as Prime Minister in the United Kingdom, I also believe that she had one of the longest tenures in recent history.  She was a towering figure in history and an impressive leader.

Articles and books have been and will continue to be written about Margaret Thatcher and her leadership style.  Margaret Thatcher, if only because of the historic nature and length of her tenure as Prime Minister and her very visible style of decisive leadership will be a subject of study for some time.

Roger Ebert was a leader of a different ilk.  An early adopter of new media, Roger expanded the perception of what a journalist is or could be.  He took one of the more mundane parts of the newspaper, movie reviews, and created an empire.  He teamed up with Gene Siskel to talk about the big screen on the little screen.  He was an early and voracious blogger.  When he lost his jaw to cancer and could no longer speak normally, he found numerous other ways to make sure his voice was heard.

Like Thatcher, there were many who despised Ebert for his showmanship, for his insistence on writing his own rules.  Like Ebert, Thatcher paid less attention to critics than to the voice driving her to break new ground and achieve great things.

Leaders begets other leaders.  Martin Luther King wouldn't have had the success or visibility he had without Rosa Parks and Malcolm X.  Mark Zuckerberg might have been just another Harvard dropout without Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.  Some have postulated that without the walls (and ceilings) that Margaret Thatcher knocked down, we wouldn't have had Angela Merckel in Germany or Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama in the US.  Without Roger Ebert, would we have had the early adoption of the internet by critics?  Would we have cared whether or not movie reviews were on the internet?  Would we have understood the Facebook thumbs up symbol?

The point is that tomorrow's leaders are in the wings, watching what today's leaders are doing and learning from their triumphs and their failures.  As each new generation of leader breaks new ground in style or inclusiveness or social consciousness, the leaders who follow find it easier to do so.  They can do this because they are standing on the shoulders of the generation that went before.  And hanging onto the shoulders of the other leaders of their generation.

As Margaret Thatcher indicates in her quote at the start of this blog, most lessons in leadership are better shown than talked about.  The world has been shown a lot by the two leaders we lost this month.

********************************

The recent tragic events at the Boston Marathon leave me in a quandry as to how to respond or whether I should respond.  I will simply say to the people that were there and to those who were impacted by what happened there, the thoughts and prayers of a nation are with you.  I would also make a plea that as a society we work harder to find less violent ways to express ourselves.  Thank you.

Related articles

• Knowing Why