SoloJourno

Freelance photojournalist, Kyle Cassidy’s photographs have been published in the New York Times, Baaron’s Financial, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. He’s known for his fashion and portrait photography, but his articles deal mostly with technology. During the 2004, he developed an interest in the issues surrounding gun ownership and began to photography gun owners.

Over a two year period, Kyle criss-crossed the States, travelling 15,000 miles to photograph gun owners in their homes and ask them one question: “Why do you own a gun.” This resulted in the 200+ page book, “Armed in America” of which he says: “This isn’t a book about guns. It’s a book about people.”

His words on the scope of the project:

Whether it’s 39% or 50% of Americans, it’s still an awful lot of people. I started wondering just who they were, what they looked like, and how they lived. Such was the genesis of Armed America: Portraits of American Gun Owners in Their Homes.

The idea was to photograph a hundred gun owners, in their homes, and do a gallery show. I figured this would take about two years. But very soon after I started, it became evident that my ambitions were too low. My mailbox flooded with letters from people I didn’t know wanting to participate — I realized that I could probably photograph a hundred people in two months, but it wasn’t a number of people that was important, it was their stories — a cowboy in Texas, a survivalist in Montana, a deer hunter in Pennsylvania, a sheriff in Georgia, a soldier in Idaho….

What I really needed, I realized, was to get moving, to drive across the country and find America somewhere between here and there.

Product Details:
Hardcover: 208 pages
Publisher: Krause Publications (2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0896895432
ISBN-13: 978-0896895430
Product Dimensions: 12.2 x 9.2 x 1.2 inches

Visit the book’s website:

Via Nieman Journalism Lab:

When people talk about the long tail, they often focus on consumer goods, where the infinite shelf space at a company like Amazon or Netflix allows a huge variety of products to be sold. But the same concept can apply to news, where cheap servers make it possible for hyper-targeted coverage — the stuff that only appeals to a few hundred people — to live online with few concerns about space or scarcity. Toss in search engines and dead-simple publishing tools and you’ve got a bounty of easy-to-find, niche-friendly content.

Whether intended or not, Ron Sylvester is stocking the long tail. The veteran crime and courts reporter for The Wichita Eagle uses his blog What the Judge Ate for Breakfast to publish two-minute videos that dive into the intricacies of a courthouse. They’re fascinating clips, touching on everything from the role of prosecutors, to odd defendant behavior, to the less glamorous responsibilities judges assume. These glimpses into the life of a court are classic examples of long tail content: the type of stuff that would never see the light of day on traditional platforms.

It makes sense that something like this would come from Sylvester. He was one of the first beat reporters to jump on the Twitter bandwagon, tweeting updates from the courtroom. The positive response to the Twitter coverage encouraged him, and he started looking at different techniques for covering his beat. “There’s so much human drama in the courthouse,” he said. “I’m trying to find ways to expand the coverage and use multimedia to do that.”

What the Judge Ate for Breakfast (the name comes from a quote attributed to Jerome Frank) launched in early 2008 as an ancillary outlet to Sylvester’s court coverage. It initially featured interesting asides and courtroom miscellany, all delivered as regular text-based blog posts. Sylvester started mulling bigger ideas about a year into the site, and his growing interest in video dovetailed serendipitously. “I was kind of jealous of TV,” Sylvester said. “I wished people could actually hear some of this testimony and see the expressions instead of me describing it to them.”

With the help of colleagues in the Eagle’s photography and web departments, Sylvester cobbled together equipment and started learning. The first video in the series — which runs under the title “Common Law” — appeared in July, and he’s now posting a minimum of one new clip per week.

Read the full article.

Via the Canadian Journalism Foundation:

Tom Hanson was a swashbuckling photojournalist whose images from the Oka conflict to the cut-and-thrust of the House of Commons told vivid stories. He was an award-winning photographer for The Canadian Press who travelled around the world and across the country, shooting some of the most iconic news and sports images of the last 15 years.

When Hanson died suddenly at age 41 in 2009, his family, friends, colleagues at The Canadian Press and the country’s photojournalism community wanted to find an appropriate way to honour his memory, talent and spirit. The result was the creation of the Tom Hanson Photojournalism Award.

The Hanson Award is administered by the Canadian Journalism Foundation and offers a six-week paid internship at The Canadian Press head office in Toronto for a photojournalist in the early stages of his or her career. The annual internship is designed to give a photographer trying to break into the business the chance to perform on the national stage. The Hanson Award is open to any Canadian photojournalist who has been in the business less than five years – from students to freelancers to photographers working at regional publications.

Read the press release (and check the full criteria). View a gallery of Tom’s work. See also A Tribute To CP Photojournalist Tom Hanson (which includes examples of his work).

The Los Angeles Times has covered a story about three homeless seniors: Bessie Mae Berger, aged 97 and her two sons, Larry Wilkerson, 60, and Charlie Wilkerson, 62. The live in a in a rusty 1973 Suburban.

Read the full story. And view the audio slideshow where Bessie Mae and her sons talk about their situation.

And homeless seniors who fall through the cracks doesn’t just happen in Los Angeles. It happened right here in Toronto recently, and was covered by The Toronto Star: Al Gosling is now homeless at 82 (Sept 18/09). Housing Corp. agrees to send Al Gosling home (Sept 19/09). From home, to shelter, to hospital (Oct 10/09). One old man died. Shame on us (Oct 13/09). Older tenants need help before eviction notice (Oct 14/09). Coroner to investigate Al Gosling’s sad death (Oct 16/09). These columns were written by Toronto Star columnist Joe Fiorito. Photo credit: Andrew Wallace / Toronto Star

The Globe and Mail has posted Behind the Veil: An Intimate Journey Into the Lives of Kandahar’s Women, an outstanding multi-part interactive series by photojournalist Paula Lerner and reporter Jessica Leeder chronicling the lives of women in Kandahar, one of Afghanistan’s most conservative, volatile cities. <br>

Part 6: Wishing for peace - A fervent wish for peace ‘so I can see what happiness tastes like’

Shafiqa is finding happiness as a shut-in after a relative is injured in the war — she’s one of the women from Kandahar interviewed for the Globe and Mail’s six-part “Behind The Veil” series

Photo credit: Paula Lerner.