This week we had Matt Martel answer some of our questions. He is responsible for managing a large team of photographers and graphic designers and has spent alot of time in the industry.
When asked what different opportunities exist by publishing to touch and mobile devices he said many - and that they tend to to do desktop web first - and then mobile, and print gets done at the last minute. Often a project that takes a month will have no print component till the last day.
Once upon a time they could do a graphic once - for print. Then they could do it twice - for print and the web. Now they do it three times - print, web, tablet. This could go on forever with the expansion of technology and devices.
He explained that data visualisation is nothing new but the mass interest in it is.
"That's a good thing. Anyway we can explain the news to people in better ways helps us as journalists. The world is visual and we need to reflect that. The issue for us is that the really big data pieces take masses of time and don't justify themselves with traffic."
He then went on to suggest websites like infogr.com because it allows journalists to really quickly create numbers/data-based graphics which can be attached to their stories.
When asked what impact the dwindling numbers of staff photojournalists having on the presentation of the news and how can we create more avenues for photojournalism in the future Matt told us that this is concern but we will have to learn new ways to overcome this obstacle.
"We have fewer photographers in the industry as a whole and that is not a good thing for news generally.....but we also have much, much faster technology so they can do more and we have more avenues for our photos. Making use of thrid-party services to take exclusive photos for us has helped reduce our costs and makes our newsrooms more sustainable.
Having said that, there are many great photographers out there who are not professionals who we engage with through our photo club Clique and we just look at social media to see what the public can do."
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