Incorporating Photos into Digital Media

I have to admit that while I'm familiar with many things on the internet and in general with technology, digital cameras frighten me.

I don't own one. I don't have a desire to own one soon. The seemingly endless amount of buttons and switches on them makes me yearn for the simplicity of the disposable cameras I used back when I was a wee sprout, going to school dances and on summer trips. They were easy to use and all I had to do was go to a Walgreen's and get them developed.

Sadly, the amount of time it would take to do that, get the pictures developed, take them home and scan them with my printer (another piece of equipment that has way too many buttons for its own good), and then find an image-hosting site to post to in order to link it to a story just doesn't cut it for today's digital era. It probably never cut it.

Pictures, unlike videos, are the easiest things to post next to a story, but they also demand more from them. In a video, you can cover multiple areas of the story over the course of a minute or two. In a photo, the reader demands to know what the picture says and why it's important enough to make it to the screen, often with a little a caption description as possible.

You don't want just a mug shot of a person referenced in the story. You want an action! And moreover, you want an action that doesn't have to be explained too much, debated, or an action that is meaningless.

(Now, if I were smarter, I would have remembered about copyright laws and never posted a picture that I wasn't supposed to at all...but since I did and subsequently took it down...here's what it was: Jon Lovitz from The Wedding Singer in a picture that looks just like Steven Schucker.

Apologies, Mike.)

First Impressions

Question: how would you respond to being told you are in the first class in a department’s history to converge two different aspects of the same field for a particular class and goal?

Well, if your name were Steve Schucker, most likely you’d respond with some sort of joke about how last night Larry Hughes made his first attempt to pass the ball to a teammate.

Though I think the punch line to that joke would be negative and not at all the feeling you’d want to have with a daunting task like the one this sports journalism course is undertaking.

It’s hard enough just to get taken seriously in a program that pretentiously looks down on sportswriters as being frivolous or unimportant.

Yet, here we are, given the first chance at combining two separate areas of our desired field into an experience unlike anything else being offered in the Columbia journalism department.

The challenge, although one that might seem a little challenging from the outset, looks to be well worth any difficulty that goes along with it, and I know I for one will be looking forward to learning more about a broadcast side to journalism I avoided like Schucker after a game of pick-up in the summer.

Oh, how I hope Steve never sees this.