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While Facebook and Twitter clearly have a strong hold on the networking and news side of social media, I’ve been blown away this week with my discovery of Quora. While trying to get my friends and followers on other networks involved this week, one response came in more than any other — “Really? Another site to check in? Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare? I don’t think I need anymore social media”

My answer to this is plain and simple: yes, one more site — and you won’t regret it.

For inquisitive people, Quora is an amazing outlet for finding knowledge on any topic, person or event. While Twitter has a lockdown on breaking news, the possibilities for Quora are endless. Also worth a mention are the amazing possibilities for journalists. This site can open up a lot of doors for crowd sourcing and information hunting.

But first, let me explain some of the basics to people who are still unsure of what this is, how it works and why they should use it.

Quora is based on questions. Or another way of saying this: Quora is based on the collective wealth of knowledge from experts around the world. You might call it — knowledge based social media. In a job posting for the site on May 26, 2009, co-founder Charlie Cheever wrote:

We’re working on building a community-generated database of the trusted information that interests people most.

After nine months of development and a beta period in 2010 Quora’s about page from the official launch in June of 2010 went into a little more depth describing the sites functionality:

Quora is a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it. The most important thing is to have each question page become the best possible resource for someone who wants to know about the question.

One way you can think of it is as a cache for the research that people do looking things up on the web and asking other people. Eventually, when you see a link to a question page on Quora, your feeling should be: “Oh, great! That’s going to have all the information I want about that.” It’s also a place where new stuff–that no one has written about yet–can get pulled onto the web.

So — users can pose questions, answer questions or edit another person’s answer (or question) on just about any topic.

Someone yesterday asked me: “Isn’t that like Wikipedia?”

While both sites deal with knowledge; however, on Quora, you can follow users (like on Facebook or Twitter). However you can also follow topics and questions which along with your friends or followers activity will appear in a newsfeed similar to what you would see on Facebook. However, what makes this very unique compared to something like Wikipedia is all content is tied back to actual people.

Users fill out biographical information per subject they are following. When you answer a question — your bio, specific to that topic will be available to other users. This helps source information and gives you an idea of what type of background “an expert” has whereas on Wikipedia you kind of just accept it might not be accurate.

Open vs. Closed Circuit Social Media

This has been a big topic of interest for me for awhile. I think a lot of social media can be classified into two categories — open and closed circuit.

The easiest examples of these are Facebook and Twitter. I would call Facebook a closed circuit social media network. Provided you setup your privacy controls, most of your information will only be available to people you are connected to (and often, people they are connected to). This makes Facebook (at least on a user level) a place for real life connections in a digital world — but those connections have a closed circuit.

However, on Twitter — words, people and topics are searchable to anyone. These topics, people and Tweets are also indexed by Google which makes the information open to all and searchable to all. You won’t find too many closed doors here. This open circuit form of social media allows for information as well as users profiles to go viral. Although this can happen on Facebook — it takes the action of a lof of people for a topic, event or person to appear on everyone’s news feed.

Quora fits the open circuit model of social media. Anyone can search or follow a topic, question — or, search for a person or follow a person. The searchability and usability of this site make it extremely powerful in making information viral.

Possibilities for Journalists

While I am describing the possibilities above in terms of general topics, the possibilities for live news events here is massive. For citizens, netizens (sorry, normally I hate that word) as well as journalists — Quora can be used in a real time manor to learn about what’s happening with non anonymous voices sourcing information. While on Twitter its easy enough to find out whats happening from “@expert_anonymous_handle” Quora will give citizens and journalists background on who is saying what — while also allowing room for dialogue and integration of some rich media into that dialogue.

Right now, I’m following the updates on a question: Are journalists getting story leads from Quora yet?

Within the answer to the question, multiple examples of journalists using Quora to find leads and even source information are given, including this list Quora built list: What third parties have republished Quora content?

Credibility for the Inquisitive

Some people don’t care if they don’t know an answer to a question. I am not one of those people. As about 100 questions pop into my head per hour, I find myself constantly looking up things on Wikipedia with a degree of skepticism. With Quora, dialogue that follows questions and answers can really help a user get an idea of validity in an answer — whereas in Wikipedia you might only see a note that says: “This information hasn’t been validated.”

Furthermore, it seems a lot of credibile people are using the site. Lydia Dishman writes in Fast Company in an article titled “Q&A Site Quora Builds Buzz With A-List Answerers”:

What … becomes evident while clicking around Quora, is that serious heavy-hitters are answering questions there. Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz offers his opinion of the movie The Social Network. Google Images product manager Nate Smith explains how color image search works. Foursquare’s head of business development talks about what it’s like to work for founder Dennis Crowley. Twitter’s Pierre Legrain explains the cost-per-follow principle for Promoted AccountsM. And AOL co-founder Steve Case answers how much it cost to mail everyone those CDs back in the 1990s.

Credibility, usability, searchability: while bringing knowledge to people and people to knowledge

These elements which make up this site are a fantastic combo not really seen in other social media sites. After six months of the official launch the company is reporting an $86 million valuation with over 500,000 user, although this (user number) is apparently debated on Quora in a question here. Latest figure on that post is: “Today 1/3/2011 at 9:00am EST it reached 547,777.”

Links:

• Quora
• About Quora
• Follow me on Quora
• “Q&A Site Quora Builds Buzz With A-List Answerers” by Lydia Dishmant
• How do I get started using Quora?
• What do people find most useful about Quora?

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Night time photography has been a hobby of mine for many years. When I used to live at Lake Tahoe, I was constantly doing this. Now living in a small Chinese village of 20 million people, opportunity to do this is less frequent.

Even less frequent, are opportunities where clients need bulb exposures.

However, recently I worked an assignment for South China Morning Post where bulb exposures were needed — however, unlike my experience at Lake Tahoe shooting long exposures, this shoot in Hebei Province, China had some time restrictions. With bulb exposures and the nature of Camera RAW, you never want to be in a rush.

For those that don’t know, a bulb exposure is:

Bulb, abbreviated B, is a shutter speed setting on an adjustable camera that allows for long exposure times under the direct control of the photographer. With this setting, the shutter simply stays open as long as the shutter release button remains depressed. An alternative setting common on film cameras is Time, abbreviated T, where the button is pressed once to open the shutter and again to close it.

So — a bulb exposure allows a photographer to shoot for extremely long periods of time, up to many hours. However, digital cameras shooting RAW images, require the same amount of time to take a photograph as to process the image. Ergo, one would have to wait 10 minutes to see a 10 minute exposure in the LCD of the camera. This brings you back to the film era where you can’t actually see what you are shooting directly after you push the button.

The tricky thing about this: often when you shoot bulb exposures you want to shoot, then see results and adjust your settings but not the frame. Which means you have to commit to not shooting while the camera processes the image, wasting time. In this situation, I had no time to waste — or perhaps a better way to look at it is — you have no time to screw up.

The assignment was to photograph the LAMOST Telescope. A massive telescope on a mountain near Beijing. “The telescope is the result of a 300 million yuan (HK$350 million) project that took more than a decade to complete.” After completing the telescope, cities like Beijing and Tianjin have grown so much that light pollution is making the telescope less powerful. My idea, was to shoot long exposures from around the telescope to show light pollution.

I was driven to Hebei province and given 1 hour to take photographs in complete darkness. The photographs above and below all range between 10-15 minute exposures — meaning, I had to guess on three exposure times without seeing the result. It wasn’t till I was in the car on the way home where I could see the images. Due to the processing time, this meant I could only take three photographs before leaving.

Growing up in a digital world, this was quite scary. Leaving an assignment without seeing your photographs — or even knowing if you have a backup image is something I don’t have to do very often.

Fortunately, after doing this type of photography as a hobby for years I was pretty comfortable and was fairly happy with the results. Two out of the three frames I thought came out well, while I didn’t like the third so much. Funny enough, the photo that South China Morning Post actually used, was the photo I didn’t like. C’est la vie.

If you are interested in the story behind this image, read the SCMP story here, but unfortunately, it is behind a paywall.

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Here are some of my favorite bulb and longer exposures from the past, where I haven’t been under time pressure.

Round Mound, Zeyphr Cove, Nevada — 538 seconds.

Emerald Bay, Lake Tahoe, California — 399 seconds.

Lake Tahoe, California — 30 seconds.

Heavenly Mountain Resort, California — 30 seconds.

For the past week, I’ve been working on a Web project for chinadaily.com.cn with the goal of visualizing China’s massive economic growth. This is a time lapse video project that visualizes symbols of rapid development and urbanization. These images are juxtaposed rhythmically against images depicting development’s effect on traditional culture. While this is a video project and doesn’t use still images, one of the great part’s of the Canon 5D Mark II is its ability to shoot still images while shooting video, allowing me to grab some interesting still images while on the project.

Taking Still Photos While Taking Movies

It’s possible to take still photos at any desired image quality setting while taking movies, simply by pressing the camera’s shutter button. This function provides a great deal of flexibility to photographers who may need to capture both still and video images of the same subject. This is not the same thing as grabbing a frame from the video footage; instead, the still image(s) are recorded as separate files and stored on the memory card the same way as other still images. When taking still images during a movie, Live View is interrupted temporarily. It resumes automatically when the last exposure ends. The movie clip continues to record while the still images are being taken, with the result that there’s a short gap during playback at the point when the still images were taken.

As someone who always wants to do more than one thing at once — this is a great novelty. A lot of time lapse video just takes patience — sitting, watching, waiting (repeat) and than a stupid amount of time in front of the computer waiting for video to render and deinterlace. Being able to shoot stills while watching the video capture makes this process a lot less boring. Video does skip for 1 second during this process; however, when your shooting 10 minutes to compress into 10 seconds, this isn’t a big deal.

Here is a sneak preview of some of the scenes you will see in the video coming next week, as well as a demonstration of the 5D Mark II’s ability to shoot stills during video mode.

The shots above and below were all shot during video mode.

Time lapse problems with the Canon 5D

I did encounter some issues with the 5D’s ability to capture long shots for time lapse purposes. Most of the clips for this video are between 5 minutes and 1 hour long, and than slowed down or speed up to 500-1500 times the real speed in Final Cut Pro. According to Canon:

The EOS 5D Mark II will record movies up to 4GB per clip or a maximum continuous movie capture time of 29 minutes and 59 seconds, whichever comes first. Depending on the level of detail in the scene, a 4GB memory card can record approximately 12 minutes of movies at full HD resolution or approximately 24 minutes in standard definition

This ends up being a problem, for example, if you wanted to shoot sky movement over a cityscape continuously for 1 day. However, for the purposes of my video, most of the clips going into the movie are around 5 to 10 seconds (in real time, about 3 to 5 minutes). If anyone knows a work around to this problem, I would love to hear a solution.

A LETTER TO EVAN OSNOS:

In a “Letter to China” New Yorker writer Evan Osnos asks “Does Twitter matter in China?”

Having lived here for only 11 months, I have never known China to have open access to Twitter as it was blocked by the government last June right before I arrived. However, I have been an active community member of China’s Twitter community since day 1 … well, ok, maybe day 10 after having to learn the A, B, C’s of VPNS, proxies, PPTP, LT2P, and other acronyms you only know if you have to.

I have been part of other Twitter communities all around the world — and I would suggest China’s Twittersphere is among the most sophisticated and advanced in the world.

Osnos writes:

Can Twitter really tie people together in a country where it is blocked? Before writing a profile of artist Ai Weiwei—published in the magazine this week — I had only a vague sense of Twitter’s presence here. It has been blocked since last June, which means that the average Web user who tries to sign on to Twitter from a regular Internet connection will get a page that says that the “connection has been reset,” or words to that effect.

Osnos key statement here is: “the average Web user who tries to sign on to Twitter” is blocked.

So who does this leave? The super users.

This makes China’s Twittersphere extremely unique. We’ve lost a lot of the bullshit that clogs up Twitter streams in Europe and the U.S. Users here are so committed to using the service, we are willing to go through all kinds of bassackward measures to communicate and share information.

The people that will try Twitter out for a week, send three tweets out a week on their dinner plans and than never use the service again — simply don’t exist here. If you see someone on Twitter, you can pretty much guarantee they will be there day and night and every day this week.

We also all share a couple things in common beyond using Twitter. We all face the same government restrictions and all chose to find ways around them. This effort unites the Twitter community in China. We all share a common understanding of computer systems and have a broader understanding of Twitter in comparison to an average Twitter user elsewhere. Jason Ng’s small sample of Chinese Twitter users survey points out:

The majority of the [Chinese Twitter] users has bachelor degree and the second largest group is master degree holders followed by twitters with tertiary education background.

The data shows that about 30% of the respondents are students followed by computer software and hardware sector (15%) and then Internet related production sector (12.5%). If we group the two into I.T industry, then we can see that students and I.T professionals are the key player in Twitter community as they together constitute more than 50% of the respondents.

Internally we have a community of well educated, tech-savvy users sharing information and dialogue from around a fast-changing country. However, our community reaches far beyond the Great Firewall of China. Our Twitter friends outside of the middle kingdom are China experts, political analysts and the likes. In a secret society, the voices of those that speak beyond the walls might be heard more.

Although I have only circumstantial evidence, this might mean the average China user might have more followers than the average user outside of China. Are our voices louder because of China’s ban on Twitter?

Yesterday, the Dalai Lama responded to questions via Twitter and other social media networks. While Mashable used the headline “Dalai Lama Uses Twitter to Circumvent Chinese Government,” in some ways it might be more accurate to say: The Dalai Lama addressed a very powerful group of tech savy netizens in the world’s largest blogging country. Some estimates say there are over 30 million blogs in China. Those blogs reach the world’s largest online population. Some estimates say China now has over 400 million Internet users. As an outlet to reach more ears — the Dalai Lama’s tact is both powerful internally in China — and acts a symbol to the rest of the world.

AFP reports:

150,000 Chinese are estimated to have Twitter accounts, with as many as 100,000 of them physically living in the mainland.

While 150,000 is a small number compared to the rest of the world — it would be pretty fair to say — many of those people who use Twitter are also blogging to to Osnos’ “average Web user” and the other 400 million Chinese internet users. The strong Twitter community helps bring information outside the Great Firewall but also streams lot of information into Chinese based social media sites like QQ, Rehren — who users far outnumber Twitter’s in china.

Some useful links

• Evan Osnos: Letter to China — Does Twitter matter in China
• Evan Osnos Article: Must-Reads on Ai Weiwei and Chinese Art
• My Beijing Twitter list (not on here – @jonah_kessel and I’ll add you)
• Kaiser Kuo’s China Folks Twitter list
• 12vpn.com: A great VPN that works on the mobile platform and old fashioned computers
• Viscosity: A great Open VPN client
• AFP: Dalai Lama tweets to Chinese web users
• The Blog Herald: How How many blogs in China?
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If you didn’t know, I am the mayor of the Confucius Temple in Beijing, China 北京孔庙. Its the second largest Confucian Temple in China after the one in Confucius’ hometown of Qufu. I must say, it is a lot of work governing a temple built in 1302. Lots of paperwork, middle-management types and inter-office politics exist in ancient deity too.

I’m also the mayor of Beijing’s Bell Tower, originally built in 1272 during the reign of Kublai Khan. Does that make me more powerful than Kubla Khan? You can decide. But in the meantime, Foursquare tells us who is in charge.

If your unfamiliar with Foursquare — its a rapidly growing geo-based, social media network with economic incentives for both users and businesses. Read more about them here. Users can “check in to” locations – a business, a subway stop a 900-year-old ancient Chinese tower. Anything. If you want to become mayor of a place, all you have to do is:

What is “The Mayor” all about?
If you’ve been to a place more than anyone else we’ll crown you the “The Mayor” of that place. We see lots of bars and cafes now offering “Mayor Specials” – a free coffee or appetizer or maybe a special discount to the mayors of their venues. Watch out though – if someone else comes along who has checked in more days than you, they will steal the “Mayor” title back from you.

Earlier today I saw @newmediajim check into the White House, which made me ask the question, if Obama is the President of the White House – who is the Mayor of the White House? Furthermore, who is the mayor of the Sphinx or the Eiffel Tower. With over 1 million users and 40 million check-ins, as of Monday, May 10, 2010 here is my list of the top 10 coolest mayors in the world :

• 1) The White House: Aya m
• 2) The Great Sphinx of Giza: Eohyung l.
• 3) The Eiffel Tower: Nicolas M.
• 4) The Acropolis: Kakos Lykos
• 5) Tian’anmen Square: Trevor H.
• 6) Machu Picchu: Leon V.
• 7) The Taj Mahal: Jeff Clinton
• 8 ) Stonehenge: Mister R.
• 9) Yosemite National Park: Carrie H.
• 10) Angkor Wat: eohyung l. 용인시, 경기도 (Yes, apparently the guy who is the mayor of the Sphinx in Egypt is also the mayor of Angkor Wat in Cambodia – he’s also the mayor the men’s bathroom on the first floor of the White House)

Although there is no mayor yet, people have checked-in all around the world: at Easter Island, the Galapagos Island, the Great Barrier Reef to Chichen Itza or Uluru. Mashable says today:

Location-based social network Foursquare counted its 40 millionth checkin a “couple days ago,” according to a tweet from one of its developers.

The number shows that Foursquare’s growth rate is accelerating: Five weeks ago, the company announced that the total number of checkins had reached 22 million. In short: Foursquare appears to have doubled its checkin rate in just over a month.

So as it grows, so will the competition of mayorship. I’ll be happy if I can hold on two 1 of my 2 ancient temples. Given the choice, what would you be mayor of?

While you think about that question, here are some more photos from in and around the temple that I govern.

Last week I answered some questions for journalist Steve Buttry on my thoughts on photojournalism and entrepreneurship. I had the pleasure of sitting in on one of Steve’s lectures a couple years back in Reno and have kept in touch with him through Twitter since. Recently, Steve was recognized as Editor & Publisher’s 2010 Editor of the Year for:

“his leadership in transforming the newsroom not simply to adapt new technology to newsgathering, but to engage the community in deeper ways reflecting the two-way communication that is today’s media reality.

Steve’s motivation and direction in journalism is an exciting breath of fresh air and something to keep your eye on in the future. While many in the industry are stuck in the doom and gloom mentality, Steve is pushing creativity and innovation in technology to make “the complete community connection.” You can (and should) read about Steve’s ideas in his Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection as well as his call for a mobile-first strategy. Steve recently left Gazette Communications and started a new path as the Director of Community Engagement of TBD.com, Jim Brady’s digital local news operation covering the Washington area for Allbritton Communications. This new startup is right up my alley and I’m excited to watch how things play out for them. From what I can gather, they seem to have the right attitude toward navigating today’s media environment. This attitude is even symbolic in the new Web site’s recently decided name “TBD.com.” They had trouble finding a name for many months. Finally, they wrote on their site:

In a mixture of humor and frustration, Editor Erik Wemple began signing his emails, “Editor, TBD.com.”

Before long, we realized Erik had stumbled upon the perfect name for our site. The traditional news culture is that you don’t publish or broadcast a story until all the questions are answered, all the t’s crossed and i’s dotted. The evening newscast or morning newspaper is presented as a finished product, the culmination of a day’s work for the news staff.

But TBD will never be a finished product. On the web, on mobile devices and on our 24-hours cable news channel, we’ll always be in motion: constantly updating, improving and evolving; seeking more details, reaction or community conversation. We’ll be a place you visit to watch the news unfold in real time.

Traditional journalism says you answer the five W’s in a story: Who? What? When? Where? Why? We’ll answer them, but perhaps a couple at a time, with the rest TBD. We’ll be honest with our community about what we know and what we don’t know. We’ll tell you what questions we’re still pursuing and tell you how you can help us find the answers.

This attitude could break down barriers and walls which have separated journalists and readers since the Guttenberg. It should kick many journalists off the pedestals they sometimes stand on and could create a different type of news flow many newsrooms are striving for, but can’t break tradition enough to actually get it. Add a notion of new media story telling for a mobile and Web based audience and I’m sold. Who know’s, maybe they’ll even make Google Wave useful …

Advice, thoughts and ideas on global imagery

You can read Steve’s original entry here. Some people mentioned they thought it was a good read for aspiring photographers — with Steve’s permission, I’ve reposted the Q&A here. Steve’s questions are in bold and I am the regular type face.

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Jonah Kessel and Carmen Sisson discuss
entrepreneurship and photojournalism

April 28, 2010 by Steve Buttry
One of the classes I will be speaking to at the University of Iowa today is a “Global Images” course. I will be discussing changes in visual journalism in the digital age. Some of the differences I wanted to address are the necessities of multitasking, online promotion and entrepreneurship.

I asked two excellent visual journalists I know who are multitasking entrepreneurs with strong web sites, Jonah Kessel and Carmen Sisson.

Jonah is a designer and photojournalist who fits perfectly in the Global Images course. In the past year or two, he has worked in Algeria and China, and has produced stunning images from both countries. Carmen is a freelance journalist struggling to make a living with writing and photography in the South. Her Fearless Journalist blog about her travels and struggles is one of the most compelling personal chronicles about journalism that I have seen.

As a good blogger does, Carmen answered my questions with a blog post that I will let speak mostly for itself. She offers lots of practical career advice for photojournalists, like this nugget:

Learn to like numbers. There’s a tendency among freethinkers to eschew all things that smack of corporate ennui. But here’s the thing: Those boring spreadsheet columns ARE freedom. Take as many business classes as you can, even though they’re not required.

Jonah answered in an email, which he gave me permission to post here. It follows in full, lightly edited, with my questions in bold:

First, a general description of how I (Jonah) am navigating the visual business world today. I have two Web sites — a blog and a more commercial style showcase site (formerly kesselimaging.com, now merged into jonahkessel.com for SEO purposes).

My heart is in editorial photography and multimedia storytelling. However, to get by financially as well as stay employed as a staffer (and having benefits) my work spans an enormous range of visual fields including wedding photography, commercial food photography, videography for television and private businesses, Web and print design as well as commercial advertising including billboards or product photography. Last year I redesigned three newspapers including the China Daily (The National English Language Newspaper of the People’s Republic of China), La Voix de L’Oranie (a French daily tabloid in Algeria), and Sawt Al Gharb (an Arabic daily newspaper in Algeria). Previous to this I had designed and redesigned tabloids, broadsheets and magazines in the US.

• • •

What sort of traffic do you get from the site?

The following stats are not counting bots. Over the past 6-months my blog received over 5,000 unique visits with an average user visiting 7.63 pages. The average user spent 6:05 on the site. The commercial site received over 7,000 unique visits in the same time period. Some of these stats are a little deceiving because of Flash. One page might have 50 images on it, but the analytics will only count 1 click with the user only visiting 1 html page.

Of this traffic, 46.79 percent came from direct traffic, 43.71 percent came from referring sites and the remaining 10 percent came from search engines.

From the 43.71 percent of traffic coming from referring sites, 15 percent came from Twitter, 15 percent came from Facebook and another 15 percent came from other social media aggregators such as ShareThis, hootsuite, visualeditors.org, etc.

Does it generate freelance business for you, or do you sell any pictures from the site? Or is it mostly a place to showcase your portfolio for prospective employers?

Both the sites generate freelance business as well as help sell prints and licenses. Print sales are minimum; however, there is no effort involved in the print side – I’ve been using free automated services that print and ship. On an average month I’ll take in $100 with prints – on a good month $500.

The big goal is to sell licenses to use photos. One license, depending if it’s an editorial use or a commercial use, generates anywhere between $50 to $800. When I have images which I feel will be useful to an individual person or company I setup direct URLs for potential customers and send them links like : www.kesselimaging.com/stevebuttry.

I then monitor these pages individually to gage how much interest the potential buyer has in the images – or if they even look at all. Once that link is hit, and I haven’t given the link to anyone else I can track the visiting IP address to confirm if its who I’m trying to sell images to. If I then see 10 IP addresses on the images with 300 hits, I have a heads up on them that they are interested and can gauge a price. I’ve sold images to an enormous variety of people like this from commercial airliners to political parties to restaurants.

I also use this method for weddings. Before I left the US, about 15 percent of my income was coming from wedding parties. These days I’m busy enough I don’t have to do this anymore, but for years of being paid poorly in the US, this was a pretty helpful tool to gaining extra income to buy gear.

I also track IP addresses for potential employers. I’ll send links to interactive resumes, or even PDF resumes and can watch if potential employers click on them. Especially after college trying to get jobs, and applying to hundreds, I found that at least 75% of job offers never even looked.

Now, I rely heavily on my sites for potential employers. I believe it would almost be impossible to get a job in today’s market without having some type of Web presence for employers to see. The days of sending out photo books and portfolios are long gone – either people already know who you are and or you have to sell yourself online. In the past when I have been applying for jobs, I have designed entire Web sites specifically directed at a single potential employer that may include flash animation, html, video and photos.

Any insight you have on photojournalism today? Your observations on photojournalism and consumption of photography from your travels?

Well – that’s a broad question – here’s a couple thoughts:

ON GLOBAL MEDIA: On a global scale, we don’t all share the same definition of what the media is, or what its supposed to do. The role of journalism in China is very different to the role it has in Malaysia, Madagascar or the US. It’s completely normal for a journalist in Africa to only write articles when they are paid to do it directly from a source. It’s also normal for that same journalist to sell the story to three different newspapers with three different bylines. The openness of the media in Germany might make the US media look mild hitting at points. I’ve seen articles be translated 4 times before it goes to press. More than words can be lost in translation.

This can complicate global communication and create a lot of misunderstanding when a journalist reports from one society back to another often implementing their values onto another set of cultural beliefs.

As the globalization of mass media increases, I see more commonalities in the look of the media we consume. However, a wolf in sheep’s clothing is still a wolf. There are very deep-rooted cultures behind the media we consume.

ON GLOBAL PHOTOGRAPHY: Although photography is highly subjective in nature, I used to believe we could all agree on “what a good picture was,” although we might disagree on “which the best picture was.” Working internationally I believe that thought isn’t so true. Our inherent cultural understanding of society which is heavily influenced by the environment which you grew up in makes this subjective nature even more subjective.

When I got to Algeria, newspapers would blur out almost all faces appearing in a photograph. When I asked “why?” I might get a response like “we think it looks better” or “we don’t wan’t to upset anyone.” There were no legal requirements to do this, but everyone was doing it. After months of discussions on what the public benefit might be to showing faces, we began showing them. After one newspaper did it, other newspapers started to follow. Often with 3rd world developmental journalism you try to make change on a micro level with the hope of others following suite to foster change on the greater media environment.

Family values in China are so strong — if you show a Chinese photo editor two photos, one with children in it and one without — they’ll choose the photo with kids in it the vast majority of the time. The value of representing youth here is so high it out weighs the visual importance of the other image.

A have lots of little examples of different tendencies in global visual communications. When someone dies, its very normal to use a black screen behind the copy. It would be extremely offensive to make a tight crop on a Chinese politician – yet, we would have no problem cropping Obama’s eyes out and using it 7-columns wide on a broadsheet (that would get you fired here if you did that with Hu). Insetting a person’s mug shot into a dark photo would imply that that person was dead in Asia (which is ok with me because I hate insetting photos). On a day of mourning, a newspaper in Asia might only print in black in white.

ON PHOTOJOURNALISM TODAY: Today’s world of photojournalism is fiercely competitive. I believe in today’s media environment a photographer needs a solid understanding in HTML as well as sound engineering, video shooting and editing and the ability to wield social media’s power in making content viral … and of course, just because you create images doesn’t mean you don’t need to know AP style and be able to write stories and cutlines. The rapidly growing mobile industry also means we have to think about many platforms. My new commercial site has different entrances for Flash users, HTML users, blind Internet users, mobile, iPhone and iPad users. If your not visible on a mobile device, your not visible enough.

Attitude may however be the most important thing. With converging media, you need to be able to work cross platform happily — I don’t know too many photographers that only shoot still pictures. You need to be able to collaborating with citizen journalist and other staffers – rather than compete with them. This isn’t an easy task. Having a positive attitude really helps with the challenges we face.