Individuals on the newspaper staff, its local management and, indeed, the corporate office, all have their own agendas, and my job at the paper is defined by those agendas.
My agenda here is to learn what I can about the future of community photojournalism and find some form of practical adaptation. I can neither afford the HD digital video equipment and software advocated at last weekend's seminar, nor do I think my small newspaper likely to employ such for the duration of my career. My format will have to be the audio-driven slide show, and I want to learn how to produce these slide show stories using the bare minimum of equipment: a Fujifilm Finepix digital camera and an Olympus WS-320M digital recorder.
Toward the end of the seminar, I mentioned this idea to an intern at the newspaper in Tacoma. She gave me a look of disgust. What she didn't understand is that sometimes you have to employ guerrilla tactics in order to bring about revolution.
Back in the late nineties I shot most of my daily assignments with a Nikon Coolpix for more than a year, simply to demonstrate to my newspaper the sheer efficiency and economy of going to all-digital photography.
The Fujifilm/Olympus gear might demonstrate the viability of the sound-slide format for community journalism and help hasten the development of our website into the inevitable alternative to newsprint.
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