Continuing on from parts one and two, in mid-1996 we entered a phase at the Tribune where photographers were taking month-long shifts as photo editor. My shift came and went without incident. At the end of his month Paul Fraughton volunteered to do another thirty days. After that he stepped up to the plate and spent more than two years as photo editor. (That’s Paul at left in the photo above, which is riddled with details that my colleagues will remember.)

During most of Paul’s time I found myself being the weekend photo editor every Sunday as well as some Saturdays. Compared to the short sprint of the weekday meetings the Sunday huddle was a marathon. Even though the Monday newspaper we were putting together was the least-read edition of the week, deciding what went into it took a full two hours— more than twice as long as a typical meeting. From my point of view it went like this: The first 45 minutes were spent chit-chatting about the day’s paper and current events, followed by 40 minutes going through the stories we had, and then 30 minutes would pass while lackeys were sent out to print out hard copies of every story so the editor could read them start to finish. With all of that taking so long, it was shocking that every decision seemed to be made in the final five minutes. And for all the wasted time, I must admit that the final decisions were often brilliant. But on most days I had a hard time hiding my irritation at having to sit there for so long, considering how little my input was called for.

The focus of the meetings was to plan out A-1 (the front page) and B-1 (the front page of the Utah section). A major difference between then and now is the emphasis of photography on the section fronts back then. When we sent a staff photographer to an assignment in the late 1990s, it was almost guaranteed that the photograph would appear on a section front. We would rarely send a photographer out for a photograph that would only run on an inside page. And just getting the right photo on a section front wasn’t good enough. The size of photos was frequently an issue that we were working to improve.

In the meetings there was a great love for the written word. We even ran a story every day dubbed “column one” that was our pick as the best read of the day. What a great thing it was, this passion for the written word. I’m serious. As an avid reader, I soaked up the contagious enthusiasm for brilliant writing. But brilliant photography didn’t always have the same support. The photo editor in the daily meetings was always outnumbered and at times I sensed skepticism about my opinions on the use of photography. If we had a space issue and it came down to cutting words or photographs, photographs always seemed to lose. While industry studies repeatedly show the importance of photographs, it’s often forgotten when it comes time to make decisions. Still, we pushed for bigger and better photographs.

After one series of bad layouts we brought up the issue of photo size with the top editor. He wouldn’t always agree with us but he would always listen. This time he came up with a guideline for section fronts, especially the sports page. The main photo on any section front would be at least 2,000 square picas in size. The secondary photo was also given a minimum size as a guideline (in those days most fronts had just two photos- the big one and the small one). When we expressed doubts about being able to enforce these guidelines ourselves, he assured us to call him at home if we caught a photo being sized too small in the layout process.

One night Ryan Galbraith put in a photo from a high school football game. The guy laying out the sports page sized it down to 18 picas wide by four inches or so. It was too small. We made our protest but he wouldn’t budge. Now it was decision time. Do we call the editor at home or let it go? Of course I wouldn’t be telling you this story if we didn’t make the phone call.

A few minutes later the door to the photo department slammed open (yes, it is possible for a door to slam OPEN). The sports guy was furious. I can still hear him: “You just had to call (the editor), didn’t you?!” Through gritted teeth he gave us a new, larger size for the photograph.

It was an interesting time in photo. While Paul was the guy in charge, management never had a rigid military-style hierarchy. We were a team of professionals and treated as such. Photographers were able to get things done on their own without following a chain of command. The door to the top editor’s office was always open and some of us made good use of it. One photographer (codename: Cobra) went out of his way to get new and much needed Nikon F5 cameras approved for everyone, as well as a new 400/2.8 and 500/4.0 lens for the pool locker. We were traveling a lot at the time and we put together some cool travel kits with laptops and scanners. One kit was a complete darkroom that you could take anywhere, provided you could jam it into the trunk of your rental car. Compared to today’s technology it was all quite primitive but it was thoroughly thought out and researched. We knew what we were doing and it showed.

I won’t pretend to know how those years as photo editor were for Paul. That’s his story to tell. I’m sure I owe him a few apologies for missteps and pranks. Hey Paul, remember the time I was given a specific set of instructions from a top editor on how to photograph a tele-prompter, and I completely ignored them? My bad. And the time I hid the padlock to your locker? Weak, I know.

As a photographer who took a desk job, I’m sure that Paul often felt the lure of the assignments pulling at him. Especially when he was sending people to the Olympics in Japan, or on a trip across Africa. I guess I’ve never thanked him for stepping up and running the place during that time. I am honored that he’s a friend.

Paul also made a key hire, a lab tech named Lori Post who went on to be the machine that kept the place running for a decade. Starting in the tech position she quickly figured out how everything worked and refined a lot of our processes. Together we streamlined the digital workflow (with Lori providing the much-needed common sense). Working late shifts you’d often find photographers blasting each other with rocket launchers playing Quake 3 Arena while waiting for their film to develop. Definitely good days.

to be continued…

Sometimes an idea hits you ten years later than it should have. Over the weekend I launched a new site for Utah’s photojournalists, freelance photographers, students, and anyone at all interested in the topic. Photographers can promote their work, talk about technique, etc.

The motto is Share, Learn, and Prosper. Not that I’m a trekkie or anything.

Check it out: UtahPhotojournalism.com.

I’m continuing on from yesterday’s post…

Before he left the Tribune, Director of Photography Jim Fisher did a lot of things for me. Some that I didn’t appreciate until later. Like the many times he would encourage (force) me to go to the daily meeting. We called it the huddle, and it was (and is) the afternoon meeting where the top editors decide which stories and photos go into the next day’s newspaper.

There were many reasons I didn’t want to be in those meetings. First, I wanted to be out taking pictures. I was finally a staff photographer at a big paper, wasn’t I? Why spend time in a meeting talking to word people, I thought. But to be honest, there were other reasons. It was intimidating. These people were real journalists. I hadn’t been around many of those at the two smaller papers I’d worked at. These editors were intelligent and not at all afraid to take on tough decisions. I was still in the formative years of my career and found it hard to imagine that I deserved a seat at the table.

But Fisher told me that it was important and he made it a point to get me into those meetings as often as he could. And as much as it seemed a waste of time spending an hour debating which story was half a percent more important than another, the exposure to these editors was an education as well as an introduction to what was possible at the newspaper.

Fisher left the Tribune in 1996. To fill his shoes the photographers were put into a management rotation. Every photographer was scheduled to spend a month as the photo editor, handing out assignments and going to the daily huddle. The photographer’s main role in the huddle was to run the computer. Well, it wasn’t really a computer. It was called an AP Leafdesk (and you can see it in the photo below). I would think of it as a sub-computer, if I had to think of it at all. I would rather forget that contraption altogether.

The AP Leafdesk was a photo storage system that let us browse and search through photographs from all over the world. Back in 1995 less than a thousand photos would move over the wire on any given day. It’s probably ten times that now. (Quantity over quality, remember? Gotta get those web hits!) Before the huddle, the photo editor would go through every photo in the Leafdesk and tag the best and most important images. These were the photographs we would push for in the meeting.

But it’s not like we spent a lot of time in the meeting evangelizing great photojournalism. Our role as photo editors in the daily huddle circa 1996 was a mix of advisor and lackey. Most of the time the main job was to sit by the computer while the managing editor sketched out the front page on a piece of paper with a pencil and ruler. He’d say, “How deep will that photo be at 52 picas?” And you would type “52 picas” into the crop tool and then read out the resulting depth in inches. Okay, I’m being charitable. It was worse than that—photos usually ran much smaller than 52 picas wide.

But there were times in the huddle when our opinion as photo editor would count and you’d see the result on the next day’s front page. Those days made up for the times our suggestions were ignored. Over time the meetings became somewhat tolerable for me. I got to know the editors sitting around the table and began to understand what each one was after.

Other photographers never got comfortable in the huddle. A photographer once wore a hockey helmet into the meeting. Was it just to be funny or was there more to it? A little of both, to be honest. Another time a photographer was paid fifty bucks by a colleague to cover his meeting shift.

There were certainly times you felt like a frog crossing a perilously busy street (yeah, like Frogger). A swaggering editor having a bad day could easily come out of nowhere and step on you when you least expected it.

I remember one incident very clearly. After I covered the 1996 Summer Olympics with two reporters, an editor took us to dinner for a debriefing. It was his job to put together a plan for covering the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano. At one point he asked us what we thought that plan should be. One of the writers said, “Nagano is our dry run for the Salt Lake games in 2002. We should cover this exactly the same way we plan to cover the 2002 games, devoting a lot of space and coverage to it.” I agreed, and said, “I agree with Mike. We should do it just like we expect to in 2002. This is a practice run.”

The editor turned to me and TURNED ON ME, snarling out these words: “Oh, okay. I’ll just go walk into (managing editor) James E. Shelledy’s office and say, ‘Hey, Trent Nelson says we should cover the Nagano games the same way we plan to cover the games here in 2002.’”

Like I said, sometimes you’d get stomped for no good reason, just like Frogger.

Being in the huddle and having the chance to make my opinions known was invaluable. My opinions?

1. We need to be running the best photographs, no matter what.
2. Photographs should be chosen for their content and not their shape.
3. Great design is as important as great reporting writing.
4. Let the people with visual skills make the visual decisions.
5. It’s not all about photographers wanting their photos bigger.

The more people I could expose to my point of view the further we could improve the paper visually.

To be continued…

Legendary Tribune photographer Tim Kelly in the old Tribune photo department circa 1996.

Thinking about how it was at the Tribune ten years ago is like time traveling. Things were so different in just about every way. For starters we were shooting film. And that meant I could put aside the Nikons if I preferred to shoot with my Leicas, or my medium format Mamiya 7, or with my Hasselblad Xpan (panoramic camera). Just thinking about how sharp that glass was is making my mouth water. A curse on your soft wide glass, Canon.

The photo department at the time was in a state of transition. We had a stable of talented veteran photographers. But newspapers are generally run by the word people. Reporters and editors who work their way up the system into the power positions. If you’re a photographer being sent all over the state to meet fascinating people and witness historic events, working your way “up” into a desk job is something to be avoided at all costs. And that means that the final decisions on how photography is used in the newspaper were often made by people from the word side, who generally had little in the way of visual skills or education.

From what I could gather, the Tribune photographers back in the day (like back in the 70s) considered themselves as firemen. They would sit around outside the small darkroom in the northeast corner of the newsroom (in the old Tribune building on Main Street) smoking cigars, drinking coffee, and cursing. When news happened they’d grab their hats and rush out. At least, that’s how those days are remembered.

From the way I understand it, the photo department back then was a service department. Reporters and editors would hand out assignments. The photographers would shoot the jobs and hand off prints with no input as to how they were used in the newspaper. When I arrived at the paper, some people were in the process of trying to change that.

The Tribune was never on the cutting edge of design. It was a traditional newspaper. On most assignments you knew that only one photograph would be published. You didn’t need a detail shot, you didn’t need any b-roll. You just needed to nail that one perfect shot that told the entire story. While obviously limiting, that was a great, challenging system for me to grow up in. When you were limited to one photograph, you shot differently. You had to think. You didn’t take meaningless photographs, you  put some thought into going after the one shot that mattered. You also learned how to make tough decisions in the edit. Pouring over your negatives on the light table looking for that one shot, you learned how to pick THE SINGLE BEST FRAME, which is not always an easy task. It was invaluable to me and I still use those skills on every assignment.

Newspaper photographers are often thought of as being quick and dirty photographers, putting the speed and rush to beat deadline ahead of the quality of their work (and development process). Not true in my career, where at every paper I’ve been able to work at a high level of quality. The veteran photographers at the Tribune reinforced that in me. Quality was important. More important than quantity. Everything was about quality. We had great equipment (oh wait, that was all my own gear…but yes, it was great). We splurged on expensive film (Fuji HG, made for wedding photographers). And we didn’t feel any rush to spend tens of thousands of dollars on the digital cameras of the mid 90s that only provided low quality images. Why bother when with film we could hit deadline consistently and without sacrificing quality?

When I came into the department in 1995, the process of improving the reach of the photo department was underway. Jim Fisher was our Director of Photography at the time. One day the daily note from the managing editor (printed on paper and distributed to the staff) began with a paragraph saying that for a monthlong trial basis, all decisions on photography would be made by Fisher. He would be choosing the photographs for all section fronts and overseeing the layouts. It was a big deal in the photo department. We were finally getting a chance to see what things would look like when our skills were put into play. For the Tribune it was a seismic shift, even if only for thirty days. It was a departure from how things had been done for decades, and maybe since the start of the Tribune in the 1800s. But think about how obvious that move should have been: Take someone who knows photography, who has studied and practiced it and put them in charge of photography. Instead of handing out assignments in the photo department, let them oversee how photography is used in the newspaper. Put them in charge of the photographs we publish, what the reader sees, and how they see it. Hard to believe that it was (and still is) such a novel concept.

It feels like the month Fisher was given that power was October 1995. And he worked his butt off that month. After thirty days it did come to an end, but a point had been made. The table had been set, even if the meal wouldn’t be served for another four years.

To be continued… Definitely…