Newspapers aren’t doing as badly as you think

By the way, you can still make money publishing newspapers—even in a period when advertising has plummeted. Check out Gannett’s third-quarter earnings report. Its newspapers pulled in more than $100 million of operating income on revenues of $1.04 billion. In the first three quarters of 2009, advertising revenues were off 31.6 percent, but circulation revenues were off less than 5 percent, even though many of Gannett’s flagship papers lost subscribers.

via Daniel Gross – Slate Magazine.

Todd Ruthven, AD, JWT Detroit, on automobile advertising

CGI has definitely found its place in advertising but has not and WILL NOT replace actual photography. I believe that nothing can replace the spontaneity and “happy accidents” that can occur while actually shooting something.

[…] When you make something too perfect you run the risk of making it look fake. Using CGI requires the creative person to actually create flaws in the image. Therefore making it look believable.

via Greg Ceo Blog.

Photographer iPhone Marketing Apps- Cutting Edge Promotion or Money Hole With A Fresh Coat of Paint?

I’m not surprised that the king of promotions (Monte Isom) was the first to come out with an iPhone app as a marketing piece (here). It usually pays to be the first so I’m sure it worked for him in the way that a well made mailer might and as a method for cutting through the email clutter it must have been solid gold.

Not long after Monte’s came out I saw another from Caesar Lima (here).

According to this story on the WSJ Blogs (here), companies like Net Solutions in Chandigarh, Inda build apps for clients at $3,000 to $15,000 a pop.

It will be interesting to see where this ends up. I can certainly see an app from someone like Howard Bernstein being quite valuable but how many individual photographer apps can you download before your phone is clogged.

caesariphone

An Interview with Gerhard Steidl

In the past, I had to take my own humble photography to printers, and I was always shocked to see that the printers ruined the images. Originally, I wanted to simply see my own photos printed well, instead of being angry about bad reproductions all the time – for which I then also had to pay.

via Conscientious.

Photographer Rights Activist Tests LA County Sheriff’s On Their Understanding Of The Law

Discarted a blog written by “photographers & concerned citizens living in Los Angeles. / With the goal to shoot photographs freely in public spaces wherever, whenever, of whoever. / And a desire to get the word out, educate and engage,” has video posted of an encounter with two LA County Sheriff deputies inside the Hollywood and Western Metro Station. MSNBC is reporting (here) that Shawn, the man who took the video says his constitutional rights were violated and he’s posted phone numbers and emails on the Discarted site to rally complaints against the deputies (here).

I love the idea that a group of photographer rights activists will go out and make sure the police understand the law. These Sheriff Deputies not only fail they try to intimidate the photographer by threatening to make his life miserable if they were to place him on a FBI watch list. They also try to review the images he’s taken but can’t because he’s shooting film.

The Sheriff initially tells the photographer what he is doing is against MTA rules (here).

Photography Guidelines

* Only permissible in public areas, proof of fare required in marked fare required areas (station platforms of all rail stations and the Metro Orange Line)
* No commercial photography without prior authorization and consent from Metro
* Hand held equipment only, no tripods are permitted
* No photography inside moving trains for privacy and safety reasons
* No flash photography, especially into oncoming transit vehicles (rail or bus)
* Photography must not interfere with passenger safety or movement at any time

thx for the tip, wmanthony.com

Foto Week DC Starts Tomorrow

Foto Week DC starts tomorrow and it looks like there’s plenty to do for people in attendance (here).

fotoweekdc

This screening (here) of a movie on Yousuf Karsh caught my eye because I’m a huge fan.

Film Screening – Yousuf Karsh and Portrait Photography
DATE: 11/10/2009 – 11/10/2009
WHEN: 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM
WHERE: Embassy of Canada

501 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20001

To be “Karshed” was a synonym for having attained the summit of worldy achievement. During his 60 year career, the 15,312 sittings he had, resulted in arguably a portrait gallery of the most famous figures of the 20th century. This film is the celebration of his centennial year of birth.

Produced by Ian McLaren / Production Grand Nord
Written by Harold Crooks and Joseph Hillel
Directed by Joseph Hillel

2009 / 51:30 min.
COST: Free

The bigger the company, the bigger the blunder

This is why your company needs an experienced marketer on staff. Real marketing directors have an understanding of intellectual property laws. Photographs, fonts, illustrations, and other design elements found online are not free for you to use, especially for commercial purposes.

via Brand’s Anatomy.

A New Model For Old Media And An Old Model For New Media

Maggwire.com, a company I’ve written about before, has a plan to charge users for a subscription to a channel that sounds really good to me. There should be a way for magazines to sell content in pieces, so people can assemble their own based on their interests. Also, it’s a good way to recapture the readers they will lose when they finally raise the subscription and newsstand prices. The New York Observer has a brief story (here) on the three former Wall Street investment analysts—Ryan Klenovich, 24, Jian Chai, 26, and Steve DeWald, 24—who started Maggwire.com and who want to “do for magazines what iTunes did for music.”

Here’s the pitch: Offer users a year’s subscription to a “channel” where they can get premium magazine content from a series of relevant magazines, for, say, $1.99 a month, with an additional 99 cents per magazine that they want to add to the package. The publishers would keep 75 percent of the profit, and Maggwire would get the rest.

McSweeney’s, which began in 1998 as a literary journal, edited by Dave Eggers, that published only works rejected by other magazines, has grown to be one of the country’s best-read and widely-circulated literary journals. They’ve just announced that No. 33 (available for preorder here) is to be in the form of a daily broadsheet. Yeah, a newspaper that will be 112 pages all in color along with a 112 page magazine, a 116 page books section, a pocket sized weekend guide and 3 pull out posters. The NYTimes reports:

The pages will measure 22 by 15 inches. (Pages of The New York Times, by comparison, are 22 by 11 1/2 inches.) Called San Francisco Panorama, the editors say it is, in large part, homage to an institution that they feel, contrary to conventional wisdom, still has a lot of life in it. Their experience in publishing literary fiction is something of a model.

“People have been saying the short story is dying for a lot longer than they’ve been saying newspapers are dying,” Jordan Bass, managing editor of the quarterly, said in an interview on Tuesday. “But you can still put out a great short-story magazine that people want to grab. The same is true for newspapers.”

As the crusty old corporate magazines continue to die there are people out there forging a new path.

PanoramaPRFINAL110309-1

A Secret Copyright Treaty

I’m not sure how much of this is true but Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing is reporting that a secret copyright treaty has been leaked (here) and there’s some very interesting language in the draft text (again, who knows if it is true):

“A requirement to establish third-party liability for copyright infringement.”

“in order for ISPs to qualify for a safe harbour, they would be required establish policies to deter unauthorized storage and transmission of IP infringing content”

Which Cory is interpreting to mean ISP’s have to police copyright and have to cut off internet access to accused copyright infringers or face liability.

Nobody knows what the future looks like from here but certainly some type of deterrent that makes people think twice about [illegally] downloading music, software, movies and even grabbing photos would be good for us. Cory is saying it would be impossible to run a service like Flickr, YouTube or Blogger but would you really care if those services didn’t exist? There’s plenty online I can live without and certainly if it means a robust media industry I’m all for it but I’m a little biased.

Interview: Damon Winter

So many of the photos look so similar and every time you press the shutter you’re thinking that this photo ever so slightly improves on the last image. And the next improves the last. And you never really know when they’ll stop improving. At some point you get the photo of the day – the photo you’re happy with.

via Too Much Chocolate.

Andrew Zuckerman – Bird

Andrew Zuckerman seems to have figured out how he wants to use new media to spread the word about these books and films he’s pumping out. He creates a simple custom site: http://www.birdbook.org/; then a vimo channel for the 9 excerpt and behind the scenes videos: http://vimeo.com/channels/bird#5701425; then the publisher (chronicle) has a site with an embeddable preview of the book (here), plus they have facebook and twitter channels. He’s certainly at the forefront of testing all these cool new ways to get the word out. Certainly worth keeping your eye on, plus the pictures are fantastic.

Discovered it on a blog of course, Swissmiss.

Bird — Book of Photography

Last Days of Gourmet

Kevin DeMaria, former Art Director at Gourmet Magazine took photographs of his final days at the magazine (here).

lastdaysofgourmet

I almost wrote a piece not too long ago about food magazines because I’d unsubscribed to Gourmet but then discovered that having access to millions of recipes online is really a pain in the ass and what you need is an editor and some beautiful photographs to get your mouth watering so I resubscribed. Too bad Si killed it off. I hope they bring it back someday.

via, Will Steacy Blog

We get so fixa­ted on our own shtick

A very res­pec­ted jour­na­list once told me, “I’m always telling stu­dents, if you want to be a jour­na­list, for God’s sake don’t be a Jour­na­lism Major. Study something else, like The Clas­sics or Archi­tec­ture. That means when you start loo­king for work, you’ll be brin­ging something to the table besi­des ‘Shop Talk’.”

via  Gapingvoid.