by Frank Van Riper

During the 1968 presidential campaign when dinosaurs walked the earth, I was probably the only national newspaper reporter who carried a camera and a typewriter. Back then, carrying gear like that was a commitment. Along with my eleven and a half-pound Olivetti “portable,” I toted a big Nikon F single-lens reflex loaded with Tri-x, and a hefty Nikon lens.

I had joined the New York Daily News less than a year earlier, on June 21, 1967, one week after I graduated college. Beside the fact that I was given this golden chance to write for what then was the largest newspaper in America, I also realized that I was going to be paid–$125 a week—to do what I loved most: be a reporter.

No one called it multi-tasking back then, but that’s what it was. And, frankly, I do not remember missing it when I joined The News, where an army of men and women put out the equivalent of a small novel every day, each person doing his or her assigned task very well.

Some form of multi-tasking occurred as I ventured forth from the little office that housed us editorial trainees and introduced myself to as many editors as I could, seeing if there was anything that needed doing. I wrote for the daily paper; I wrote for the Manhattan-Bronx section; I wrote for the Sunday Magazine. You name it, I probably wrote for it.

In late 1967, I was sent to Washington. I had no idea then, nor had anyone else, how tumultuous, tragic and divisive that presidential campaign year would be. After about six months of learning my way around, I was given the chance to cover Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey as he crisscrossed the country on a campaign swing preceding the Democratic National Convention that would nominate him for president (and also provoke riots in the street). The pre-convention swing was a week-long trip that had everything: “cheers, jeers, kisses, celebrities, arm-twisting, fence-mending, pickets and noise.”

I used that same construction in a full-page op-ed piece but, proud as I was of the article, I was prouder still of the photograph of Humphrey that I made on the campaign plane and that accompanied my piece (with the tiny legend “News photo by Frank Van Riper”).

I walked into the office the day the piece ran expecting plaudits.

“Don’t ever do that again,” said my bureau chief, Jerry Greene.

The reason? Daily News photographers in New York, seeing that a reporter, of all people, had taken a picture for the paper, had threatened to file a union grievance over the transgression. (Remember unions?)

With one notable exception, I never took another photograph for the Daily News. The one exception was when I interviewed a convicted murderer in a maximum security prison hospital in California.  It was tough enough to get me inside the walls. The photo desk said—grudgingly, one assumes–that I could take my camera.

What a difference changing technology and tightening budgets can make.  A recent piece in the magazine Photo District News said “Photojournalists need to prepare themselves by learning new skills, particularly audio, video and multimedia editing to increase their attraction to potential employers.”  Only a fool would not listen to good advice particularly in a dynamic and changing job market. The danger, though, is what happens when–in an increasingly bottom-line-hungry climate in which deadlines are constant—news organizations (or, more correctly, the suits upstairs who call the tune) feel they can pile various jobs onto a staffer who is in no position to complain, and still expect to get professional quality results in both words and images.

This isn’t new. Small town dailies would routinely give their reporters a camera and tell them to come back with a pic of the city council president or homecoming queen to accompany the story.  In most cases, this did no great harm. But now, even major news organizations, especially in war zones or other dangerous places, are equipping their ostensible print reporters with digital cameras capable of shooting streaming video and expecting them to supply images and video for the web while also covering a breaking news story objectively and in depth.

This is not only foolish and unprofessional, it’s madness.  And far too often, all it provides is piss-poor pictures by non-photographers.

You could ask, “aren’t you a photographer and a writer; or a writer who happens to be a photographer? Weren’t you pleased when one of your photos accompanied your story?”

Sure I was, and in later years, I did double duty with my books as both writer and photographer.  But in all of these cases, I was not working on deadline. And I was not doing two (or three) jobs in the time it would take to barely do one.

The maddening thing about journalism today is that there ARE no deadlines or, more correctly, there’s a deadline every minute, owing to the tyranny of the internet and its endlessly open maw. Print reporters and photographers are not immune: often they must supply words and pictures for their website versions throughout the day–and don’t let anyone tell you this is easy.  And don’t for a minute think this just happened.

In the 1980s, the Daily News, a morning paper, tried to fend off competition from a resurgent afternoon New York Post by printing its own PM paper, Daily News Tonight.  Don’t worry, said the bosses, we’ll use wire copy to fill the PM; you guys will still be writing only for the ‘”real” paper.

Hah!

In no time, those of us covering any important story during the day found ourselves writing one, two—even three—updated versions for the “PM.”  When it finally came time for me to write a long piece for the ‘”real” edition of the Daily News I often felt written out. I’d left my best stuff in the early edition, (circulation, maybe 200,000; circulation of the “real” Daily News – 1.5 million).

And it’s only has gotten worse.  In fact, as many press critics have already noted, the poisonous combination of deadline-every-minute journalism and near-continuous availability of images from amateurs, has resulted in a conspicuous dumbing down of journalism content, especially of images. Never mind the fact that, with the explosion of imagery available from un-vetted sources online, it is only a matter of time before a major news organization is guilty of rushing into print or online with a totally bogus picture supplied by someone with a hidden agenda or, worse, a photo-hacker who thinks it would be way cool to mess with the “establishment media.” (Case in point: the bogus composite photo of a supposedly dead Osama bin Laden that circulated shortly after he was killed.)

Decades ago, the press critic and essayist, A.J. Liebling had this to say about a preponderance of newspapers and of real reporters:

“Different reporters see different things, or the same things differently, and the reader is entitled to a diversity of reports…a one-man account of a crisis is like a Gallup Poll with one straw….”

To present “a diversity of reports” is precisely why the conservative Charles Krauthammer shares the Washington Post’s opinion page with the liberal Colbert I. King; why David Brooks and Gail Collins share space in the New York Times.

As for the “citizen journalist” I find the term almost an oxymoron and stupid in the extreme. Never mind that the “citizen journalist” presumably is too busy going to his or her regular job to actually cover anything on a regular basis or to consider issues in depth by doing real research, real interviews, all of which take real time.  Does anyone go to a “citizen doctor” or to a “citizen lawyer?” The view that somehow, without any real training in objective or at least impartial news reporting, “real people” would have the innate ability to produce a balanced, complete, nuanced, straight-from the shoulder take on the news from their self-generated blogs or websites is—I’m sorry—bullshit.

This is the time, I would suggest, for news organizations to spend more, not less, on content, which translates into hiring more professionals to do specific jobs, and not to downsize them into a harried collection of Jack and Jills of all trades. Maybe, this is the time for news organizations to charge for their online content.

I used to believe (alright, hope) that the print newspaper always would be there. After all, it’s what nurtured me throughout most of my journalism career.  Now I am not so sure. But if online journalism is to be the wave of the future, it cannot be done in the great tradition of the past if it is done on the cheap.

Frank Van Riper is an award-winning documentary and fine art photographer, journalist and author whose work has been published internationally.  His latest book, done in collaboration with his wife and professional partner, Judith Goodman, is Serenissima: Venice in Winter, a coffee table collection of black and white photographs and essays, published in 2008 both in the US and Italy. www.veniceinwinter.com. Van Riper was a member of the New York Daily News Washington Bureau for 20 years, serving as White House correspondent, national political correspondent and Washington Bureau news editor.

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