In August 2011 I joined the faculty of the University of Illinois College of Media as an Assistant Professor of Journalism. Soon thereafter, I was asked by the other faculty members to draft a profile of what a student graduating with a Journalism degree would “look like.” What skills would she have? What experiences? How would she fit into the new media landscape? Here’s what I came up with -

Because she is cognizant of the fact that the lines between broadcast, print and online journalism will continue to blur into a mobile, multimedia future, a graduating Department of Journalism student is an expert in one of the following disciplines and possesses a working familiarity the others: Writing, Video/Photo Journalism, Multimedia Design and Database Journalism/Programming.

She has had at least two internships during her four years in the department. She has an award-winning body of work that demonstrates her ability to conceptualize and develop stories off-campus in diverse and unfamiliar communities. Her resume includes references from working professionals who are recognized as experts in the field.

She is passionate about her craft, confident in her abilities and tenacious in her pursuit of a story. She self-identifies as a journalist rather than as a student or student-journalist, and has built a network of personal connections through her activities in appropriate professional organizations.

Though she is not a technician, she fearlessly embraces technology and leverages it in the creative service of her narratives.

Her online footprint is substantial and dynamic. She uses the Internet and social media tools not only to gather information and develop sources for her stories, but also to share information about those stories upon publication. Through her web presence she has cultivated her unique brand – that of a technologically agile storyteller who routinely brings her particular expertise to collaborative, multi-disciplinary projects that explain and contextualize stories, rather than merely transcribe events.

She practices journalism that is personal in its reporting and interactive in its presentation. Her projects engage her audiences and catalyze dialog within them.

She is grounded in the history and ethics of her craft. She is familiar with the trends, personalities and stories that have shaped the practice of journalism in democratic societies. She recognizes that she is ultimately accountable to her subjects and to her audience. She believes in the power of journalism to effect change.

Now… let’s see if we can make it happen, and change the conversation depicted in the above illustration.

It was inevitable. There is too large a police presence in Miami’s Overtown neighborhood and the attitudes of some of the officers there are too aggressive for me to be able to live and work in the community for long without being harassed.

Today was the day. This morning I was physically assaulted by a Miami Police Department officer. I’m still not sure exactly what I did to provoke her.

The video above clearly shows what happened – I was on a public sidewalk outside of a yellow police tape that had been put up to designate a crime scene. I attempted to shoot video of the police officers working the area and interacting with neighborhood residents when WHAM! Suddenly Officer J. Mayorga, Badge Number 4212, decided that I didn’t say “How high?” quickly enough when she said “Jump!” So she came after me. Perhaps Ms. Mayorga doesn’t like cameras or doesn’t like photographers or woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning, but whatever her motivation, her actions were clearly unreasonable, illegal and a violation of my civil rights.

Sadly, it seems that some Miami Police Department officers will stop at nothing, including drawing their weapons and shooting unarmed citizens, in order to assert their authority in Overtown and the surrounding, primarily black, neighborhoods.

One would think that an officer working a double shooting just as school busses are picking up children in the neighborhood would have better things to do than harass and physically assault a bystander shooting video with an iPhone on a public sidewalk.

But as a new resident of Overtown, I am quickly learning that some members of the Miami Police Department have priorities other than what the department claims to be its “core values,” including “Respect for the rules of law and the dignity of all human beings.” If these officers say up is down, down is up and the sky is green I’d better agree with them and do so quickly, because my dignity, the rules of law and my rights as a citizen extend only as far as these individuals’ emotional whims and personal prejudices.

My run in with Ms. Mayorga is just another example of how the police culture in Miami is out of control. It is a culture produces officers who are reactive rather than proactive, and whose reactions, even when thoughtless and disproportionate, are accepted and even encouraged by their colleagues and superiors. (Click here and here for more examples of how Miami police and armed private security guards harass photographers. Click here to read about the lawsuit photojournalist Carlos Miller has filed in response.)

My experience with police harassment in Overtown is insignificant relative to what the permanent residents of Overtown endure on a daily basis. My heart goes out to these people, Miami’s “Towners for Life,” but as the folks say in the video below, “This Is Overtown.”

This is just a quick post to share the screensaver that will grace the four multimedia kiosks that we should begin to set up in Overtown this week.

The brains within the kiosks are four PowerPC Mac Minis I got for about $175 each off eBay. These machines each have a gig of RAM, a hard drive of between 40 and 80 gigs, and not much else. In fact, I’ve uninstalled every piece of code I could remove from them and still allow them to play and record videos.

There are a few pieces of software that have come in really handy as I configured the Minis:

• AppZapper is not only incredibly useful, its ZAP! sound effect makes it well worth the minimal price. Just don’t get too carried away and zap something your computer needs.
• Movie Screen Saver is a really cool $12 piece of shareware that lets you create a screensaver from a movie file. Fortunately for my Overtown project, it runs on Mac OS 10.5. Unfortunately for future projects, it does not run on 10.6 or above.
• Carbon Copy Cloner is tried and true and indispensable. I used it to clone one Mini’s hard drive onto another so I have four nearly identical machines.
• The touchscreen functionality is part of a software package by EloTouchSystems. I don’t have all the bugs worked out of getting their drivers onto the Mac OS, but that should be ready to roll soon.
• The searchlight image is a piece of royalty-free CGI footage I bought from Getty Images.
• I used Final Cut Pro 7 to generate the text. Here’s a video of the timeline. You can see how the text blocks are layered atop one another on the video tracks:

Finally, there were a couple of tweaks I had to make that necessitated going inside the Mac Minis, which are surprisingly easy to take apart. Working with the various components crammed into that tight space… not so much. Here’s a shot of a couple of them stark nekkid:

Once again, the videos can be seen on my Vimeo channel, here.

I hope to get them up on the dedicated domain Overtowner.com soon.

Stay tuned -

This week “Overtown Inside Out” shifted in to high gear. I designed the sixteen-week multimedia project not only to document contemporary life in Overtown, but also to test the viability of a completely new method for disseminating hyperlocal journalism to communities with limited Internet access. On Friday funding came though for the multimedia kiosks that will deliver to the people of Overtown the films I make about the people of Overtown.

Overtown is one of Miami’s poorest neighborhoods. The project is built upon a foundational series of three short films, each one to four minutes long, that I shot in there in late 2009 and early 2010. These introductory films – “This is Overtown” (2009), The Eye of Overtown (2009), and “Bullets Don’t Have Eyes” (2010) – are the first three chapters of what will be a twelve to sixteen chapter documentary about life in Overtown, told from the perspective of the people who live there.

The project will involve Overtown’s residents not only as the subjects of each short film but also as the architects of the larger narrative structure of which each individual film is a basic, chapter-like component. As I shoot and produce the films, I will make them available to Overtown’s residents through four multimedia touch-screen kiosks. The people whose community is the subject of the films will have input into the editorial content of the works as they are shot. Their feedback will dictate the direction of the project’s story line, chapter by chapter, and prescient commentary will be incorporated into a final, long form documentary compilation of the chapters. In the language of the motion picture industry, I will be the “cinematographer,” “producer” and “editor.” The residents of Overtown (“Towners” as they like to call themselves) will be the “directors” and “cast,” as well as the “audience.” Photojournalist/filmmaker and subject will participate symbiotically as co-authors of the work.

Though I have gotten a lot of positive feedback about the films, I have no idea how the kiosk idea will fly in Overtown. I hope it might open some doors for dissemination of multimedia journalism there and in other communities – places urban or rural, domestic or international – where there are stories to be told (and eyes to see them and ears to hear them), but where internet connections are so rare (or so slow) that citizens are kept in “virtual” isolation.

How fast is your Internet connection? Test it for free SpeedMatters.org, and post a comment with your results.

Next: If It Only Had a Brain…

I recently applied for a multimedia journalism teaching position at the University of Nevada-Reno’s Donald W. Reynolds School of Journalism. The search committee asked applicants to write 300 words on the topic, “What Innovation in Journalism Means to You.”

This is my submission, edited only slightly because here I’m not trying to make it exactly 300 words:

To me, innovation in journalism means creating a multimedia experience as engaging as Angry Birds, but much more informative.

Innovation in journalism means taking a single camera on assignment and returning with a story publishable as stills, video and/or audio. It means making these resources easily available to a worldwide audience on a staggering variety of devices, depending on the audience’s preference. It means delivering this story on deadline in short-form (less than 4 minutes, ideally right at 30 seconds) and later making it available for collaborative re-editing as a long-form documentary (27 minutes or so). That’s what we did with this recent project documenting the faces of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals:

Innovation in journalism means creating web sites that are search engine optimized. It means logging metadata and redundantly backing up files so they can be retrieved decades later on devices yet to be imagined. It means religiously following rigorous digital asset management strategies like those outlined by Peter Krogh in this book:

Innovation in journalism means using Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, EveryBlock.com, Google Alerts and Yelp! for research when stories are in pre-production and for promotion and audience metrics when the stories are published. It means developing new social media tools that will still be relevant once all media becomes social.

Innovation in journalism means collaborating across cultural and language barriers to tell stories, as we did with this series of stories about the Roma people in Central Europe:

It means finding ways to bridge the digital divide and turning subjects into participants, as I am doing with my ongoing hyperlocal visual journalism project in Miami’s Overtown community:

Innovation in journalism means going back to school for a master’s degree after working as a photographer for 25 years if that’s what it takes to remain an effective storyteller, as I did in August 2009.

Innovation in journalism means being a teacher, a leader and an advocate for enterprising young people like these, and then getting the hell out of their way.

What does innovation in journalism mean to you? How are you expressing those ideas? Post a comment and/or link below and let’s see what we can come up with.

A number of folks have requested updates to the July 1, 2010, post concerning my lifetime banishment from the Miami-Dade Metrorail.

I’m pleased to report that since I returned to Miami in early September I have been riding said metro unmolested. I have even made a few photographs while riding the metro, though not nearly as many as my friend Carlos Miller, who organized not one but two groups of camera toting defenders of the First Amendment to descend upon Miami’s Douglas Road station wielding enough cameras to make Kim Kardashian blush.

After both Mickey Osterreicher of the National Press Photographers’ Association and Stephen Murray of the Coconut Grove Village Council wrote letters on behalf of Carlos and I, Miami-Dade County Manager George M. Burgess responded in late September that Miami-Dade Transit (MDT) had met with the private security company contracted to patrol the metro and “stressed the right of the public to photograph in common areas of its public facilities. To that end, all contracted security officers have been retrained on the appropriate manner in which to enforce” the relevant Miami-Dade County ordinance 30b-5(2). Mr. Burgess further stated that a copy of the relevant ordinance had been placed “at all MDT Metrorail security kiosks.”

I have compiled the correspondence into the single, chronologically organized PDF above.

Though I consider this result a victory, I wonder why Miami-Dade County didn’t feel it necessary to retrain the police officers from the various jurisdictions who were also involved in the skirmish. I was more shocked by city/county officers’ ignorance of a law they’re paid to uphold than I was by the behavior of the officers’ rent-a-cop consorts. I suspect that had the real police officers been properly trained in the enforcement of 30b-5(2) the security guards would’ve saluted smartly and snapped, “Sir, yes, sir” once they’d been informed of the error of their ways. A working knowledge of the law by Miami-Dade law enforcement personnel sure would have saved everyone a lot of hassle, that’s for sure.

One final thought as I consider the hell Carlos and I went through because of the “terrorist threat” we posed with our cameras – Though “the powerful bombs recently concealed inside cargo packages and destined for the United States were expertly constructed and unusually sophisticated,” none of the devices involved cameras. Yet while they were constructed using a usually innocuous device that millions of passengers carry aboard the country’s mass transit systems millions of times a day, always without a second thought from any security guard – the lowly cell phone – I’m not holding my breath until an individual carrying a camera is considered less of a terrorist threat than an individual carrying a phone.

My mom leaving her room for the last time, guided by her trusted physical therapist, Gene Hall. 'For I am already being poured out like a drink offering, and the time has come for my departure. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day—and not only to me, but also to all who have longed for his appearing.' - Paul's Second Epistle to Timothy

But recently her failing eyesight conspired with the tiny lens of my iPhone’s camera and allowed me to eek out a shot of her every now and then, and to do so in a way that I believe honored her sense of privacy.

I made the photograph above on Monday, October 18. She is on the way to physical therapy, just down the hall the little room at Carolina Village Medical Center where she spent the last seven weeks of her life. I was sitting beside her in that room when Gene Hall, her gifted therapist, came to fetch her. As Gene entered the room I let go of her hand so she could turn her attention toward him. After stepping into the hallway I turned on my iPhone’s camera and waited.

I obviously had no idea when she walked out of that room that it would be for the last time, or that she would die in her sleep four days later on the morning of her 88th birthday. Instead, I sensed only the subtle stirring inside myself that I have learned to recognize as a calling for me to bring a camera to my eye, and then to make a photograph.

This image will be my enduring eulogy to my mother. I will return to it again and again over the coming years, as I also grow old, and through it I will remember the last days I spent with her.

Her bent shoulders will remind me of her fierce determination. The reassuring touch of Gene’s hand on her back will remind me of her insecurity, sadness and unspoken need for reassurance. The slight lifting of her left foot and the little socks she wears will remind me of the times I helped her get ready for bed in the days before she died. And they will remind me that as I kneeled before her to remove those socks she was both embarrassed and quietly amused when I told her that she had pretty feet.

Finally, this last photograph of my mom will be a reminder of the lessons she taught me, including one that, though it should be obvious to a photographer of my age, I am thankful she reinforced as she walked away from me the last day I spent with her.

And that is to always, always make the picture, always respond in the affirmative to the call to photograph. It may be your last opportunity.

For their third assignment, my University of Miami Fall 2010 Introduction to Photojournalism students covered the 2010 Sunshine State Dancesport Competition at the Fontainebleu Hotel in Miami Beach on October 8-9. They immersed themselves in the assignment, took some calculated risks and knocked it right out of the park. Bravo!

I am passionate about visual journalism, and a passionate advocate for young visual journalists. So I spend a fair amount of time thinking about strategies I can use as an instructor that will allow my students to become better visual storytellers.

At the University of Miami, students in my CVJ-221T class, Introduction to PhotoJournalism, have confirmed that like their peers, they are voracious consumers of visual information. But the jejune visual idioms of the prevailing popular culture are ineffectual as tools of journalism. Our goal as journalists, in the words of legendary photojournalism educator Cliff Edom, is to “show truth with a camera.”

My thoughts on this topic continue to evolve, but I’m pretty sure that the challenge of training young people as visual journalists breaks down something like this:

Whether one focuses on still photography or motion, journalism or advertising, the essential elements do not change – ethics, technical precision, creative use of light, thoughtful composition, the power of decisive moments and a critical awareness of ambient sound. These are the fundamentals upon which an aspiring visual journalist’s body of work is built.

Some of this is relatively easy. After all, in 1978 a gorilla made a picture of herself that was technically good enough for the cover of National Geographic.

The greater challenge involves coaxing students to commit to the fact that they are learning a new visual language and that as visual creators they are no longer privileged to experience the world as they did when they were merely visual consumers. This “metaknowledge” enables students who may be accustomed to the immediate gratification of today’s grade-inflated academy to persevere through initial critiques that can evoke reactions of “shock and awe.”

As a teacher I challenge my students to use their newfound visual language to tell increasingly complex stories. I send them off campus to report on the community around them. In doing so they learn how to purposefully and ethically observe, interpret, record and disseminate visual information – skills that are fundamental to the craft of journalism, no matter how new the media landscape.

I believe in this immersive method because after having worked 25 years as a visual journalist telling stories in the most evocative and truthful way possible, every assignment still presents new challenges and each trip into the field is a learning experience. This is true whether I am making photographs, shooting video, or gathering audio.

In the classroom I can introduce students to the basic linguistics of visual storytelling and provide guidance, but if they are to become successful visual communicators they must live the process outside the classroom, through the solitary procedure of trial and error that is at the heart of any successful creative effort. I find that as they do this, students gradually acquire a new creative language and find their own voices within it. (For more on this trial and error process, see Abraham Maslow‘s 1963 essay “The Creative Attitude.”)

The learning curve associated with this method can be steep – it requires that students be tenacious enough to step outside of their comfort zone and that as an instructor I am attentive enough to anticipate and address their frustrations – but its potential benefits over the long term are well worth the cost of delayed gratification in the short term.

Because this hands-on, immersive methodology is primarily cognitive, rather than merely technical, it empowers students to innovate and employ multiple platforms to tell stories. This, in turn, makes them better journalists.

Which takes us back to the top of this page, where my CVJ-221 students’ work is displayed. I think they’ve already come a long way since MiChiMu’s Birthday Party. If you agree give ‘em a shout out. And stay tuned for their next assignment, the 2010 Miami Carnival…

The best of the best from my University of Miami Fall 2010 Introduction to Photojournalism students’ first assignment: The annual birthday party for MiChiMu, the Miami Childrens’ Museum mascot. Buncha rockstars.

It has been many, many, too many moons since my last entry here. I want to thank my loyal followers, all 1 of you, for hanging with me.

Chalk my quietude up to a crazy summer travel schedule that included four Central European countries in a month, another month of transitioning into my final (?) semester of grad school, and yet another month of assisting and advocating for my aging mother as she moves out of the home where she lived for fifty years and into a skilled nursing facility. (More on all of these topics later.)

It’s not that I’ve had no inspirations to write during this hiatus. On the contrary, inspirations have been plentiful, but inspirations are, as pioneering psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote, “a dime a dozen.” I’ve just not done the “awful lot of hard work” that Maslow describes as necessary to bring inspirations to fruition.

Chalk up my return to writing to my fabulous new students in the Intro to Photojournalism class I teach at the University of Miami School of Communication. These gals and guy (that’s right, an 8:1 ratio) really just are the coolest folks on the planet.

They tolerated me introducing myself, and the course, via Skype from North Carolina when I had to be at my mom’s bedside during her recent illness;

They patiently sat through a slide show of my own work as a college photojournalism student, during the mid-1980’s at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and even feigned interest by throwing a few well thought out questions back at me afterwards;

They continue to put up with me jumping around the room like a banshee as I try to express my deeply held belief that, as Edward Steichen said, “The role of photography is to explain man to man, and to explain each man to himself.”

And, God bless ‘em, they’re beginning to learn to shoot. The first assignment of their nascent “photographic life” (a wonderful term coined by my friend and mentor Sam Abell) was to go to the Miami Children’s Museum and cover the annual birthday party the museum throws for its mascot, MiChiMu. Just the kind of saccharine community event at which countless photojournalists aspiring for greatness have doubtlessly asked themselves, “What the hell am I DOING HERE???” It’s the kind of assignment where there are so many cute kids running around doing so many things that it’s very easy to just photograph the first thing you see, and not go below that surface level to find an image that tells the story of the event, and really covers the assignment.

And, frankly, covering this kind of event doesn’t have a lot of cache – it’s not likely to produce photographs for the cover of TIME magazine, or that win awards in the World Press Photo competition. But it is a good training ground, and it’s a the kind of assignment that teaches young photographers to do what good photojournalists do best – turn visual “straw into gold,” as another friend and mentor, Tom Kennedy, once told me.

But the students’ work from the assignment provided may avenues through which we began to explore photography, journalism and the intersection of the two during our classroom critique. And we discovered many areas in their shooting that will improve over the coming weeks – focus, composition, and a pervasive reticence to get in close, to embrace the world and allow one’s self to be embraced by the world using the best excuse ever invented for striking up a conversation – “Hi. I’m a photographer. I’d like to make a picture of you.”

Stay tuned…

I arrived here this afternoon along with four of my University of Miami (UM) colleagues to begin work on a month-long multimedia project documenting the plight of the Roma people in Romania, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. Another five of us will hit Bulgaria and Slovakia. We’re fortunate to be working not only with three of the most talented multimedia professionals in the world – Candace Barbot, Rich Beckman, and Travis Fox – but also with a number of journalists from the region who are familiar with the territory and the Roma stories.

I wanted to take a few moments to update everyone on the situation in Miami, vis-à-vis my having been “banned for life” from the Miami-Dade Metrorail. This was punishment Miami-Dade Transit’s (MDT) security contractor, “50 State Security,” imposed on Carlos Miller and I on Wednesday, June 30, after we made photographs at Miami’s Douglas Road metro stop and attempted to board one of the trains with our cameras. Strangely, MDT’s action was supported by both the Miami Police Department and the Miami-Dade Police Department.

Our response to this illegal, unconstitutional, and in my opinion conspiratorial action began as soon as we left the metro station, when I placed a phone call to Professor Sam Terilli, my media law professor at UM and the attorney representing me in this matter. Sam and I immediately began coordinating our response.

First on my list was to make multiple redundant backup copies of the raw media that I had collected at the scene. This included audio, video, and still images. I burned a DVD with one copy and slid it under the door to Sam’s office at the UM School of Communication, for safe, subpoena-proof keeping.

Next, I wrote down as clear and as concise a narrative as possible describing the incident. This is always important at times like these, because our memories of events change much faster than we realize. Writing down a blow-by-blow account not only helps to stimulate our memories, it ensures that details we recall are archived for future reference. This task was made easier by the copious amounts of audio and visual data I had recorded throughout the encounter. (I will post a representative selection of the images as soon as time allows.)

I finished this writing by about 3:00 Thursday morning, and sent it off for Sam to vet before I published it on my blog, which went live about 11:00am Thursday.

My next task was to begin to spread the word to relevant photography and photojournalism advocacy organizations. I e-mailed blog links to the National Press Photographers Association, the American Society of Media Photographers, and the Online News Association. By mid-day Thursday, Mickey Osterreicher, NPPA’s attorney, had already written letters to MDC and to the Miami Police Department. I have heard that the American Civil Liberties Union may become involved due to their ongoing interest in protecting photographers’ rights.

Meanwhile, Sam began taking action through the legal system. Though I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to go into details about what Sam is doing (all that will become public at the right time), I will share that he got in touch with the Society of Professional Journalists about case, and “reached out” to the appropriate legal representatives of Miami-Dade County (MDC).

For all of you who have asked about or encouraged legal redress, rest assured that through Sam’s efforts this process has already begun. It is a process that may move slowly, but we will be thorough, tenacious, and assured of the rightness of our position.

Because I will be out of the country until the end of July, I will be delayed until Early August from making another legal, peaceful, and determined attempt to make photographs on the Miami-Dade Metrorail. But this will happen. As I mentioned in the closing of my last post, I plan to ride the metro back and forth to UM during the fall semester, and no illegal, unjust, arbitrary, and in my mind somewhat comical “lifetime ban” is going to stop me.

Happy Fourth of July! I hope you’ve all enjoyed celebrating the fact that as Americans we live in a land ruled by laws, not by men.