The Long Telegram

I was never comfortable with the term citizen journalism for two reasons: personal vanity and mortal occupational fear. First off, I like to think that what I do for a living is difficult and specialized. Following from that, if anyone can do it, there’s no reason why I should get paid to do what I do. But I’ve had experiences recently that shattered those last bulwarks of self-aggrandizement.

Journalism, as an institution, often fails to capture the full range of emotion and nuance in stories it does take on. Because of time constraints, bureaucratic inertia or our desire to present a concise narrative to readers, we boil things down, simplify them, distill them. Worse than that, on occasion we ignore them. The only way to combat this is by increasing the number of storytellers. Far from obviating the need for journalists, this only increases the wave of information journalists can ride, if they’re skillful.

Amid the very justified news-o-sphere clamor over an oil spill off the coast of Louisiana, a new Supreme Court nominee, a bomb in Times Square and a British election, the story of flooding in Nashville fell through the cracks. For the first time I’ve seen, photographers in Nashville took up their cameras and created attention-grabbing pieces that rival anything a news network could have done. The best of these came from Michael Deppisch.

Michael Deppisch - The Nashville Flood. May 2, 2010.

Travis Fox and Adam Davidson – Solving the Tap-Tap Puzzle

Travis Fox is one of the best video journalists out there, I think. He manages to bridge the gap between what some are calling “cinematic journalism” and actual boots-on-the-ground newsgathering. This one is really cool because it has the voice-over narration that isn’t really my thing, but it is done in a conversational, radio style. I love that, and I think it works really well.

Eric – Palolem, India

I think you could point your lens at anything on the Indian subcontinent and it would melt your camera from the beauty. But this vid does a nice job of ordering the photogenic flora and fauna.

Go Outside – Helene Park

The editing here with the music: so cool. So happy.