Email with a valuable point

Got this email from Multimedia Muse, a website that displays a variety of multimedia to give a venue for the work we do. I thought it had a meaningful point, and one that put into words what I think, from discussions I've had with photographers at my own newspaper and other photographers out in the field, many of us are feeling and gives a thought on what we should continue to strive to do in these hard times. I've really enjoyed checking out the work on the site, and Well Said!

Two months. Seventy five stories. A ton of hits. If we didn’t have bags over our heads you’d see tears of gratitude in our eyes.

And yet these are dark days, my fellow photogs; our industry is sinking, being pulled below the surface by all those newspapers and magazines that can’t get their act together.

To borrow a phrase first coined by Thomas Kean of the 9/11 Commission, much of our nation’s print media suffers from a “failure of imagination.” At least in relation to their photo departments. The Web is bursting with visual potential. And yet major publications are selling our craft short: putting cameras in the hands of writers, soliciting reader’s pictures for their homepages, littering our multimedia pages with TV news videos.

We at the Muse don’t believe that what works for TV works for the Web. We don’t believe in the inclination to make multimedia bigger and more flashy, but rather smaller and more personal. More precise. With craft. We also don’t believe that posting amateurish imagery, no matter how cheap to obtain, is going to help publications to balance their books. Readers have a high degree of visually literacy; it’s the pictures that are going to sell a story. If you agree, and if your hard-earned project isn’t getting the play you think it deserves, don’t allow it to go under-noticed. Fight the power. Stick it to The Man. Send it to the Muse: www.multimediamuse.org