Getting A Story Made at National Geographic

After talking with several National Geographic photographers about shooting for the magazine I became intrigued with the process of getting a story made. The collaboration between the photo editors and photographers and then the photographers involvement in all the steps along the way is unique and important to how they make stories. More magazines should spend this kind of time with their contributors. The few times I’ve had photographer come into the office and present their images to us have been incredibly rewarding and certainly I think made the story that much better.

I asked David Griffin, National Geographic’s Director of Photography about the process of getting stories made and the rumored years it takes for a story to go from idea to printed page:

Many years is a bit of an exaggeration harping back to days past, now it is more like many months. The typical process:

1. Story proposal is accepted by editor (this can take a few days to a few weeks, depending on how much back and forth we have with the photographer honing their proposal). BTW, all proposals from photographers go through me first to determine if the idea is something I’m confident the photographer can pull off. We have a firewall to protect the photographer’s intellectual property if they are rejected.

2. Once accepted, the photographer is paired up with a photo editor and they work together to expand the proposal into a story coverage plan, including estimated budget. This is then reviewed in what is called a “story pitch” where the entire story team (photog, photo editor, writer, text editor, graphics and map staff, designer, web producer, and executive editorial team) meet with the Editor-in-Chief. If all goes well, the story is given the full green light. This can take about a month to prepare for.

3. Then it is off to the races. Stories can take many forms and lengths of field time–far too many variables to pin down an average. We usually try to do most stories in two trips so that half way through the coverage the story team can re-gather, review the photographs to-date, and make any necessary course corrections. This “Interim Projection” also gives the Editor a better handle on which issue of the magazine the story should run.

4. After the field work is complete, the photographer typically comes in to headquarters and works with the photo editor to hone the completed coverage into a “Final Projection.” Pretty much all the same folks who see the Interim, see this show. This takes about a week (although the photo editors are reviewing the photographs much sooner and at greater length then when the photographer is in the office to construct the show).

5. Then the story goes into layout and work begins on any special web features. The photographer is very much a part of that process. From our viewpoint it would be both financially and journalistically foolish to not involve directly the person who we invested our resources into for the story. The person who best knows which images capture the truth of the story is the one that was there. It may seem like a luxury, but we feel it is a part of our process that makes a tangible difference in the accuracy of the final published stories. Layout takes about a week.

6. Then it is pretty much all typical pre-press and printing process from then on out. Finalizing of design and color correction takes about a month or so, printing takes about a month, world-wide delivery about two weeks.

So from beginning to end a story can take from about six months (rare) to about a year, and in some cases–particularly with natural history coverages–a couple of years.

I’ve glossed over many details here, but these are the main milestones.

Pickup the Dang Phone

When I worked as a Photo Editor I never answered my phone. I’m sure eventually at some DOP job down the line I would have finally gotten an assistant to answer it for me. There’s two ways to go about this in the photo department of a magazine and if you choose to answer the phone whenever you can, you’ve got to be direct with your callers so you still have time in the day to still do your job or you can only answer it when you’ve got time to talk. There’s a difference though between being direct and just trying to get rid of callers you don’t know. Heidi reminded me of that at our Art Center lecture when she said “If someone would call and say they loved the magazine I would ask them, what is it exactly that you love.”

I always had a hard time being direct because I did enjoy a good chat about photography and because I had so much sympathy for the cold callers. At the beginning of my career I used to work for photographers and many times I was the one who had to cold call Photo Eds and Marketing Directors some of whom would pickup the phone and express all levels of exasperation and irritation then exclaim how they didn’t have time to talk about this right now and I thought, “well, then why did you pickup the goddam phone.”

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with trying to get the caller straight to the point and photographers should be prepared for that. I was just never any good at it.

Shooting Editorial Photography

I gave a lecture last week with Heidi Volpe (former Art Director of the LA Times Magazine) at Art Center in Los Angeles and thought I would highlight a couple things we talked about here for anyone who couldn’t attend and of course to open it up if anyone wants to chime in. The best part for me was meeting so many people who are enthusiastic about shooting editorial photography and also the time Heidi and I spent working on the lecture, comparing notes and just sitting around talking about editorial photography. We both love working with photographers and the process of putting a shoot together and seeing the work published on the newsstand. Preparing for a lecture is a good exercise for anybody working in this field because it forces you to analyze the way that you do things and the process behind your actions and I can certainly see how it would it be beneficial working with a staff and in meetings with editors to have it well thought out.

The first part of the talk we got down into the nuts and bolts of editorial photography and magazine making and I’m not going to rehash the whole thing for you here except for a couple important points that play into the second part of what we talked about.

The office politics and relationship between the DOP, PE, AD, CD, EIC, Publisher and Owner has an effect on the way that photographers are hired and how decisions about photography are made within a magazine. It’s important to realize that there are forces at work inside the publication that can have a weird influence on the photography.

In the very early stages of picking photographers it has as much to do with pacing out the magazine, creating visual variety, making powerful entry points, tackling old stories in new ways, deciding where to spend big and where to save as it does with matching the right photographer and subject.

Everyone keeps a list of photographers that they work off for these decisions and I’ve always organized mine with the front page for every photographer I’ve ever worked with (several columns) then the next page for photographers I want to work with and then several more pages of photographers organized into different categories. Many of these category groups come about because I’m forced to make a list in a category I’m unfamiliar with (cars or beauty) and after spending several days working on a list I want to hang onto it for the next time I need someone in that category. After the lecture I got to peek at another PE’s list who was at the event and saw all the familiar chaos of a list in flux with boxes, stars and highlights and notes running down the side. It’s always a mess till you retype it again.

After getting through the nuts and bolts we settled into a topic I’d like to refine even more if we ever give the talk again that we called “defining your personal style.” Essentially we wanted to get at the things we pickup on in a photographers work that convince us they are the right person for that particular job. It usually boils down to style and/or expertise in the subject matter and of course there are many other little factors that play into pulling the trigger on someone but we wanted to try and connect the dots with the work in the book and the what was published in the magazine. Heidi and I got a good laugh out of a few of our choices because it looks like any monkey could preform the job when someone who shoots swimmers is hired to shoot swimmers. I’m not afraid to poke fun at my profession and always tell photographers to not be surprised when their first assignment is the most obvious choice.

At the lecture Heidi and I whipped though 30 photographers and I think that was a mistake as we really just glossed over them and made it all seem so superficial and next time I would not only drill down into a couple of photographer’s styles (famous and not) but then pick a specific genre and discuss who is on our list for that and why. It really is a good exercise to look at a photographers work and define their style because you find yourself coming up with all kinds of strange words like integrity, crisp, finished and I’m sure it’s different for everyone who does it. So, for someone like Jake Chessum who is a personal favorite of mine I put him at the top of the list for portraits that are unguarded moments. The I would also define him in my head as easy to work with, subjects enjoy him, shoots celebrities, lives in NYC, shoots film, cover, feature, color and B/W. Anyway you get the idea on how it works and we provided 30 examples of photographers and the shoots we gave them. Heidi gleefully pointed out that I had nothing but A-listers in my examples which is hardly a good teaching example, but I had only scanned the A-list tears for my portfolio so that’s what I had to work with. If there’s another chance to do this lecture again I would certainly include more up and comers and unknown photographers.

Heidi had David Drebin as one of her examples and he’s someone who was always on my list of people I would like to work with but never have. His style can be described as shooting lifestyle, caught moments with a produced and or finished look to them (lighting, background, props, hair, makeup, set, casting all feel meticulously done). I would also put him in the category of people who shoot rich and dense color, interiors, lit, lives in NYC, shoots women well. Again you can see where this is going and the kinds of terms we use to describe and categorize photographers.

So, that’s just a quick overview of what we covered and there were a lot of good questions from the audience that we answered as well. Heidi and I really enjoyed the event and it was cool of Everard and Dennis to bring me out for it.

Tina Brown Launches The Daily Beast

Designed to have the look of a European “smart tabloid,” something already feels different with the simplicity of the front page and use of photography. This will be interesting to watch as Tina is well known in the editorial world for injecting life and chaos into venerable titles like The New Yorker (She redesigned the magazine and introduced the first staff photographer, Richard Avedon) and Vanity Fair.

From the article in PaidContent.org (here).
Web over print: Brown: “I so much prefer it. There’s nothing like actually doing something to learning exactly how it should go. One of the great agonies of magazines is it takes so damn long. It just takes forever to get a magazine out and, once it is out, I remember with monthlies, you’d publish your first issue and almost within hours of getting it out and the first response, you knew exactly how you wanted to tweak it and do things and change it and make it different and better but you were already halfway to press with the next issue so it was really sort of three months before you could change it. What I’m loving about this is we’re actually able to build it fast and get the response and weave that into our evolution. It’s very exciting. It’s thrilling.”

The Daily Beast (here).

AdAge Magazine Of The Year: The Economist

A sign of the times?

From the story in AdAge (here):
“It continues to send reporters to overseas bureaus. It covers seething conflicts in places like Russia and Georgia before they become hot wars. It follows the trends that increasingly shape life in the U.S. before Americans declare them important.”

How Can You Make A List Of Influential People And Not Include Photographers?

I picked up Esquire’s 75th Anniversary issue and was flipping through their list of the 75 Most Influential People of the 21st Century (here) and discovered that they couldn’t think of a single photographer to include in their list (WTFngF). Now, I know how these lists are made and it usually starts with the gathering of a massive list of names from all walks of life and I can see they did a very good job of balancing it out with artists, journalists, writers and such, but no photographers. Are you kidding? Time had a similar snub with their 2008 list of the Worlds 100 Most Influential People (here).

I seriously hope Nachtwey does something amazing tomorrow but surely he can’t be the only one. Can he?

Seen It Before vs Completely Original

I found these two blog posts interesting and worth contemplating head to head:

“It is all too easy to cry copy-cat or rip-off and refrain from wondering why it is so vital for your appreciation that ’something hasn’t been done before’. Of course I can’t and won’t claim to be free of this obsession, but I notice an increasing hesitation in myself to follow the lure of the game, and a need to think about different things to look for in a work. Novelty is nice for the novice, but once the jaded feeling of ‘been there, seen that’ crops us, it is time to reconsider my responsibility – if you can call it that – as viewer.”
—-Via, Mrs. Deane.

vs

“Platon has an entire portfolio of photographs, mostly portraits, titled Service in last week’s edition of The New Yorker. An extended selection of images can be seen online.”

“Listening to an audio file on The New Yorker’s site, I learned that Platon is now officially signed on as a staff photographer.”

“I haven’t heard anything about this before and frankly I’m surprised. It’s not that I think Platon is a bad portrait photographer but in my mind I don’t see how Platon can replace Avedon. His portraits shot from below against a stark white background are too indebted to Avedon’s. Maybe the magazine doesn’t see their selection as a replacement for Avedon but I certainly do. ”
—-Via, Horses Think.

James Nachtwey’s TED Prize and You

James Nachtwey and TED need your help breaking a major story that Jim has been documenting over the last two years as part of winning the TED prize in 2007. On October 3, his work will be simultaneously revealed online, disseminated through numerous media channels, and projected on monuments and public buildings throughout the world.

How to get involved:
The following link contains embeddable badges, Nachtwey’s TEDTalk, and other information related to Nachtwey’s wish.
http://www.tedprize.org/nachtwey/bloggers.html
The site will redirect on October 3 to unveil the story.

Nachtwey wished for help in breaking a news story in a way that demonstrates the power of news photography in the digital age. Let’s do whatever we can to make it happen.

Top 100 Media Companies

AdAge has their annual list of the top 100 media companies (here) and I was surprise by a couple things. The growth in 2007 was the slowest since the last recession in 2001 at 4.6% and almost 300 billion in revenue. I thought it would have been flatter then that and I was shocked to see that when they started the list in 1981 the top 100 had revenue of 30 billion. That’s some serious growth in the last 26 years.

The only significant movment came from who else but “Google — whose leap to 12th from 19th last year was the only big gain in the top 20…” “‘This is a changing of the guard,’ said Rishad Tobaccowala, CEO of Denuo Group and chief innovation officer for Publicis Groupe Media. ‘If you look back 20, 30 years ago, the major companies would probably be print-based. Then they move to basically be broadcast based. Now we’re looking at companies that have basically digital or technology underpinnings.'”

Jeff Jarvis, author of “What Would Google Do?” and director of the interactive journalism program at the City University of New York levels a little criticism at the list by saying that “There are new paths to big-ness. And those paths are not necessarily through ownership and corporate control.” He goes on to say, “The mass market is dead, replaced by the mass of niches,” Mr. Jarvis said. “Advertising people roll their eyes at me and say, ‘No, no, no.'” They cite big draws such as “American Idol,” he said. “But we all know how inefficient that’s been. And what’s artificially propping it up has been the advertising industry, because they like one-stop shopping. They’re not built to find these highly targeted networks.”

Shooting Editorial- Art Center Lecture Next Tuesday

I’ve been invited by Everard Williams of Art Center College of Design to join Heidi Volpe, former Art Director at the LA Times Magazine for a lecture in LA next Tuesday evening called Shooting Editorial.

We’re going to talk about shooting for magazines and spend the first part discussing what goes on inside a magazine, how stories are assigned, the dynamics between the different departments and in particular how Art Directors and Photo Editors work together… including the ways in which I try and trick AD’s into picking my photographer or my opener choice.

For the second part of the lecture we’re going to talk about a photographers style and how we use it to make assignments and really try and show as many examples of portfolio images that convinced us to hire a photographer and then the published results from the assignment.

The event is free and open to the public and should be informative but also entertaining since Heidi and I aren’t afraid to give each other a little shit. We will also try and tackle a few topics that have been in the news lately.

Shooting Editorial- Tuesday, September 30, 7:30pm-9:00pm in the Ahmanson Theater on Art Centers North campus. The address is 1700 Lida St. Pasadena, CA 91103.

Look Out For That Cliff

The timing of a nuclear meltdown on wall street and uncertainty as advertisers try to find a strategy online could not be worse for magazines:

Ad spending across the major U.S. media fell at its steepest rate since the industry’s last recession in 2001, according to new data released this morning by ad tracking service TNS Media Intelligence.– Report Here.

Maybe instead of a slow painful decline we can quickly hit the bottom and start implementing strategies for a recovery and rethink the priorities of printed magazines.

Here’s a strategy:
Time magazine has more than 3 million readers in print and currently does 82 million page views online, and president and worldwide publisher Ed McCarrick thinks the brand can “easily do 200 million page views” online in the near future. “We must be constantly innovative to earn audience back each day,” said McCarrick, who delivered the opening keynote at the FOLIO: Show here today.

Online advertising revenue currently accounts for about 10 percent of overall revenue at Time and is projected to grow by 57 percent in 2008 and another 35 percent to 40 percent in 2009, according McCarrick.

While McCarrick thinks online will eventually account for 30 percent to 35 percent of overall revenue, “offline revenue is still the big engine.” Still, one medium is leveraged with another. “We’re putting together a multifaceted approach and it’s no longer clean in terms of one media being separate from another.”– Story Here.

Here’s a rethinking of priorities:
From an interview with John P. Loughlin, executive VP and general manager for Hearst Magazines (here); listen to his mantra people:

“Clearly, the challenge given the current economy is convincing consumers that magazines as an impulse purchase are worth every penny. For publishers, it’s a double whammy. Publishers are under enormous cost pressures at the same time that unit sales are down, but it’s critical that we not react by diminishing the quality of the physical product or magazines’ content value proposition for the consumer.”

and

“The challenge for our magazine editors, and for all of us involved in maximizing our magazine sales, is to provide and convey that compelling value proposition to the consumer.”

and

“Which comes back once again to my point that magazines must provide even higher perceived value to the consumer, maybe even more so during this economic turbulence.”

Here’s web marketing guru Seth Godin on selling products to consumers:
Godin’s overarching theme is simple: Companies can no longer rely on mass-media advertising to sell average products to average consumers. Instead, they must create remarkable products and services and let consumers do the marketing themselves to generate a buzz. In the “new marketing” landscape that Godin chronicles, the balance of power has shifted from companies to consumers, thanks to TiVo, spam filters, blogs, and YouTube (GOOG). — Interview here.

New Site Looks to Help Distribute Multimedia Projects

Multimedia Muse (here) is a site that hopes to bring more attention to multimedia projects online. This is an excellent new trend where websites are being created not only to drive traffic but also help people find many instances of a certain type of photography or project online.

From the about page:

“We’re three photographers who believe in creating a greater corporate news demand for online photojournalism. Currently, news sites often give lousy play to multimedia projects. Lousy play means fewer web clicks. And fewer clicks means that these projects aren’t earning their web hosts the kind of revenue that they could. We created MultimediaMuse to try and turn things around: to help give our industry’s Final Cut creations the display, and their web hosts the clicks, they deserve.”