Tag: Jay Rosen

Pictures from a polling place

I got back from voting a little while ago. While I was there, I took a few pictures to upload to the Polling Place Photo Project, started by Jay Rosen’s NewAssignment.Net and now hosted by the New York Times.

I zipped off four photos to the project, which you can see here. (At right is Salem News reporter Ethan Forman, who’s interviewing a voter outside Danvers High School.) The idea is to supplement election coverage with a little citizen journalism, combining professional with amateur contributions. When it comes to photography, I certainly qualify as an amateur.

Here is Rosen’s original essay on the purpose of the project.

The site is slow today — no surprise, given that it’s Super Tuesday. I imagine things will be quite a bit busier later today, when people start getting out of work.

Rosen and the other folks behind the project hope this will somehow lead to a better voting experience. Perhaps. Certainly there’s a possibility that some real problems will be documented by camera-wielding citizens.

If nothing else, though, the project shows that professional and amateur journalists can work together to produce something that’s both interesting and worthwhile.

Not such a linchpin

New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen is ambivalent about doing interviews, and Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post asks him why. Kurtz, though, seems to think that the institution of the journalistic interview is more firmly established than it is. He begins:

The humble interview, the linchpin of journalism for centuries, is under assault.

In fact, what is widely regarded as the first newspaper interview was conducted not centuries ago, but in 1836, by New York Herald publisher James Gordon Bennett, who talked with the proprietor of a brothel in the hopes of shedding light on the notorious murder of a prostitute.

It seems strange to realize that great American journalists from Benjamin Franklin to Isaiah Thomas never interviewed people, but such were the customs of the day.