Live Chat: Tim Rasmussen
Photodome Chief
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Thirty minutes until you get to chat with Tim Rasmussen of "the amazing photo department at the Denver Post." Those are Digital First Media CEO John Paton's words, not mine. It was their quick and high-quality production of this video that won them the praise...
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I’m guessing most of our internal audience is familiar with the Media Center project, but what they might not know are the site’s roots in the Post newsroom. Could you describe how Media Center came to be?
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Media Center was an idea that Mateo Leyba and Meghan Lyden and I came up with in 2006 to try and maximize the photography content both locally and wire we had at the Post. We believed very strongly that good photojournalism didn't have a home on the web, particularly not at the Post, so we wanted to create a place people could come to for good photojournalism. -
So you started small... but it's not that way anymore, is it?
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Media Center last year was 30+ percent of the whole site. In 2006 it was less than one tenth of one percent of the traffic. The site's traffic has grown a lot since then. They've done a lot of work to grow that. Everyone on staff helps contribute to media center putting up photos and writing captures that are well-crafted. Everyone has a hand. We've positioned people's jobs to be videographers. Even our editorial assistant whose job it was to clerk for the department is a videographer.
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That's awesome. So what’s your advice for photojournalists in local newsrooms who haven’t had the benefit of extended training in multimedia?
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Worth noting that Tim has talked publicly about this topic before. Here’s video of a presentation he gave at UC Berkeley about his own transition from photojournalism to multimedia.
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None of us had multimedia training to begin with. Some of us were more in tune with that from the very beginning back in the 90s. But I think multimedia is another way of saying tell a great story. The tools are different, but the only thing that's important is is the story great. If you can tell a great story, you can tell it in photographs, video or both. The skill that has to be perfected first is telling a great story. Most photojournalists already have that.. Going from a photo essay to a photo essay with video is just a technical move. DFM has great resources for this. Some of the best multimedia journalists work at Digital First papers.
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Speaking of the best, let’s talk a bit about the Pulitizer-winning projects you’ve been involved with while at the Post. The first was Ian Fisher: American Soldier, right?
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Ian Fisher and Media Center ideas hatched at the same time. When I first got to the post, we wanted to find a story we could tell photographically in a way that compelled our readers to have a better understanding of their world. So we were pushing out lots of ideas and we hatched upon it from President Bush's State of the Union in 2007. He was talking about the surge in Iraq. The question was asked, "Who the hell would sign up now?" From that, we hatched the idea of following a soldier from high school to Iraq and home. We had no idea at the time it would take 27 months or the story the kid would go through. So it became a much more robust tale of growing up, both as a young man and in the military.
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By the way, here’s the Denver Post’s article announcing that Craig F. Walker had won the award.
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Tim, Craig, and the rest of the Denver Post photo team also received the 2010 Hillman Prize for Photojournalism on account of the Ian Fisher story and another on childhood poverty in Colorado.
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We do require and push hard to come up with ideas from our department we can bring to the greater newsroom. Ian Fisher was one of those ideas, as was Welcome Home.
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And Walker was also the photographer behind the Post’s second Pulitizer-winning effort in the past few years, Welcome Home. Could you explain what was different about this package?
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I think it's really important that photojournalists who are pitching ideas to the newsroom have a compelling story that hasn't been told and not to fall into the old habit of shooting photo essays for photo essays sake. Following up on Ian Fisher, we were very in tune to the military because we spent the last three years following them. One of the things that struck me at the time were the stories surrounding PTSD with 1 in 5 soldiers being affected. But we knew that was a very difficult story to find. It's a story of the mind. We searched high and low and talked to at least a dozen subjects before we found Scott.
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I should also mention that the photos taken as part of ‘Welcome Home’ were part of the package that won Walker the Newspaper Photographer of the Year award in the Pictures of the Year International contest.
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But it didn't end up running in print. That's pretty unusual, right?
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I think that the story was great. Craig did an amazing job with the photographs and that's certainly why it won the award. I get asked a lot about "But it didn't run in the paper." That for me is neither here nor there. What's important is telling a story and getting it out to readers. If we truly believe our future is in moving to new delivery devices, it has to be irrelevant whether it runs in the paper. I don't mean to diminish the value of the paper, but our audience online is phenomenal. If we're truly digital first, we have to give our websites equal importance and value in the work we do. In this case, that's exactly what we did.
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Do you think our newspaper websites have different audiences than in print?
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You can probably find data and parse it any way you want to prove that right and wrong. I think there's a crossover audience, but I know for a fact, it's not the same audience. On Media Center, fifty percent of our traffic comes from Colorado. You can only get the Denver Post in the Front Range and certain parts of Colorado. The other 50 percent comes from outside Colorado. What we do in print serves a key component, but what we do online serves an expanded role for the country. If you look at the Denver Post and all our digital audiences in the web, e-edition and tablet, we're the 4th largest digital newspaper presence in the country. To think our audience is limited to those who pay $6.50 a month for a subscription is really a bad idea. Then everything you do is tied to who you think your print audience is. That's not who our audience nor is it the one we should be after. I'm a 49 year old guy, but I'm trying to make a website that attracts 12- to 72 years old. We want to be the best media organization we can be and tell great stories and we want to hit as many people with them as we can. If you pigeonhole yourself as one thing or another, you can really hold yourself back.
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Interesting. Sounds like you think the web might be better suited for certain types of storytelling?
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As far as establishing a protocol for digital workflow in moderately sized newsrooms, what are some good guidelines for reporters and photographers when it comes to sharing the responsibility of video.