Posts Tagged ‘reuters’

The excitement of news

January 18th, 2009

There’s nothing quite like the excitement of getting a story. It’s a feeling I’m missing a bit right now. But I read this post from the awesome Reuters Photographers blog with a sense of knowing acknowledgement. Scrambling to action for a big story — you can’t beat it:

It took about a minute for the plane to drift behind a building. I only shot about 30 frames before it disappeared from sight again. At that point I ingested the images, made a selection, blew one up huge to confirm it was a US Airways plane and sent the first picture to our picture desk in Singapore for transmission to the wire.

Within minutes it seemed Brendan was back in front of me with pictures from ground level. He was able to shoot some pictures of passengers and grabbed a pedicab to take him back to Times Sq. His pictures kept the flow of fresh images flowing.

Eric Thayer arrived at the river and saw a group of firemen running to a big ferry boat. He asked if he could go aboard and was told yes, as long as he stayed out of the way. Eric was able to get up close to the plane and take some of the most dramatic photos of the day, of passengers in life rafts waiting to be rescued.

Wonderful!

From newsroom to mailroom

November 21st, 2008

Redundancies are terrifying. Right now, all the news reports are focusing on statistics. 90 lost here, wage freezes there.

Soon we can expect to learn of the human side. The personal losses, the mortgages not paid, the ‘Christmas is cancelled’ stories of once great journos assigned — wrongly — to the scrapheap.

It’s getting so bad, in fact, that blog software company SixApart is offering free Typepad accounts to any journos who have recently been given the chop. They’ll be signed up to the advertising scheme too, meaning they can potentially blog their way into a little money. The emphasis on little.

And I’ve just spotted this on the Reuters Mediafile blog. They quote from Editor and Publisher:

But as The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J. slowly says farewell to 151 newsroom folks who took buyouts last month, at least two longtime journalists have been reassigned to the mailroom.

Reporter Jason Jett and Assistant Deputy Photo Editor Mitchell Seidel have been filing, sorting, and delivering mail for more than a week, according to sources.

Scary.

For an idea of just how bad it is around the UK, take a look at this neat interactive timeline the Guardian has patched together: