The Sunday Storytelling Slide

If you’re reading this soon after posting, it’s Sunday morning. Maybe you’ve got your coffee going and are padding your slippered feet out the driveway to grab your Sunday paper. (Remember when newspaper carriers delivered papers to your door? Dang, I’m old …)

Sunday front pages are centerpieces, something the newsroom spends days, if not weeks, prepping for you. Big stories, big display. Or, at least, that’s the way it used to be. Over at the Poynter Institute Sara Dickenson Quinn takes a look at Sunday front pages and how there seems to be a slide in the quality of them.

Her hypothesis that the cuts to the visual sides of the newsroom have gone to deep resonates with me. You can write shorter, you can do more phone journalism, you can research stories faster now than ever before. But it still takes time to drive out to a story and bring a camera to the eye, to spend the time it takes to let a subject get comfortable, to visually explore a story.

And, with my local paper (which once had a DoP and four staff photographers) down to just one shooter, that’s just not going to happen.