A Good Cause

This year Operation Photo Rescue lost its annual funding due to the economic times we are in. If you have a couple of extra bucks and want to help the organization, it would be used well! Every little bit helps. For those of you who don't know, OPR is an organization that restores damaged photographs for victims of disasters such as hurricanes, fires and floods. You can read about its origins in the OPR Blog.

Donate Here!

Couple of Interesting Articles

Good article about the state of newspaper websites.
Call for change in the publishing industry.

What Ya Love

I never take enough photos of family members, but I think it's important to shoot what and who you love! Catchin' up with 3 of the 4 nieces and nephews:


Jacob becoming all boy


Must be nice to still fit in the sink.


Dan the Man

Jail Tour

So I got to go on a tour of a new addition to the jail yesterday.

Recycling

I really do enjoy shooting, even something like recycling. I got to follow around two workers who pick up the recycling in the city for a few minutes, and enjoyed the hustle that it was running after them.

The Election through multimedia storytelling

A great wrap-up by The New York Times.

Last Regular Season Game

There will be something both sad and not sad about the regular football season ending. The paper did some good coverage and got a lot of hits through the High School Football page this season (each team got its own page. But there is still so much room to grow for next season. Would it be better to do just one video of the game of the week each week? Could we do a sports wrap-up video previewing the games that week? Maybe add a blog for each team or a notes from the coach section? And so much more.

The Big Day

Well, election day has come and kind of gone. We blew it out on the Free Lance-Star's website, which was great to see. The web team really pulled it off, and 17 reporters and photographers contributed to the Live Blog throughout the day, editors got everything together for print, and designers pulled off a re-plate for the newspaper no problem.

My day started at 5:30 a.m. with the polls opening.



From there it was back to the office to get things up online for a slideshow and the Voices of Voters videos that would be posted all day. Each photographer went to vote when they caught a break. My precinct was pretty slow in the afternoon.


In the evening, I booked it over to the surprisingly slow polling station nearby and caught them emptying the tabulator. They definitely didn't get the rush they were expecting.


The photographers did a great job throughout the day covering the region, and Suzanne and Pete helped gather footage to put together the wrap-up video.

All in all, for a relatively small staff, they all rocked it!

Election Coverage

The Election coverage coming from the Free Lance-Star Tuesday is going to be a first-time for the newspaper. It's going to involved photos and slideshows updated throughout the day, video voices being updated from morning to evening, live blogging, changing headlines from national and local stories at the polls, interactive result map, a wrap-up video and more. For a small newspaper, it hopes to be some extensive coverage, both online and in print, from words to photos. And what's better than that? There is a bit of excitement about doing it, too. Stop by fredericksburg.com to check out more on Tuesday!