Craig Lee Photo

‘And lights, beautiful lights’

By Rebecca Rosen Lum

In the photograph, a young man and woman sit at a full table, their facial features illuminated in a rich light, the background bathed in dark chocolate shadows. The table is a study in high contrast: the platters stark white, the beef on them and the tablecloth underneath them a brilliant red. The woman portions the meal with pearly chopsticks.

The photograph accompanies a review of Prime Rib Shabu in San Francisco Magazine, and the reader can be forgiven for thinking, “I’ll have some of what she’s having.” It is a tempting vision indeed, one of many in veteran photographer Craig Lee’s portfolio.

Lee, who has documented news from the courts to the playing field, has created a new niche for himself as a freelancer, focusing on food and wine. His inspirations? Vermeer and Rembrandt.

Some months after an an assignment from the Chronicle to shoot the Pebble Beach Golf Tournament — a decidedly different kind of shoot than he was used to — Lee became entranced by the food and wine presentation he was seeing: “I thought, ‘Hey, I like this.’ I wanted to get good at it.”

As he got into it, he realized it was not as simple as it looked. “I challenged myself to at least figure out how to photograph this subject by looking at food and wine magazine covers, which looked deceivingly simple,” he said.

He got so good at it he was named the main photographer dedicated to the Chronicle Food and Wine section and helped them win three  James Beard Awards for Best Food and Wine section of a major metropolitan newspaper in the country.

The section functioned like a magazine, with section editors, writers, artists, photo editors, graphic designers, and art editors all working together.

“I knew it was a team effort and I really liked the team,” he said. “When you get appreciation it makes you want to work harder.”

Lee launched his career at the San Francisco Examiner in 1983, walking into “a magical time.” He shot the 49ers and Joe Montana in action; the Democratic Convention roared into town next.  He’s ridden with all the changes that have come to newsrooms since, from black and white to color, darkrooms to digital. He moved from the Examiner to the Chronicle, and is now making it as a freelancer.

Early on, he had discovered the quirks of shooting food while working for the Examiner. It’s one thing to make fresh fruit look luscious, but what do you do with a beef stew?

“You can’t just set the lights and shoot,” he learned. “You’ve got to pay attention to detail so qualities come alive – qualities like moistness.

“I once photographed a sausage factory making sausages,” he said. “It published in black and white. Can you picture it? Photographing food can be quite challenging. Presentation and lighting are important.”

What makes food nutritious socially and psychologically is what makes it fulfilling to photograph, Lee said – something he thought of recently while producing a section on all the Latin food on East 14^th St. in Oakland.

“It’s a part of culture that hits all of us,” he said.  “Think of the importance we place on ‘the last meal.’”

Even more than food, he loves photographing the people connected to it – chefs, restaurateurs, winemakers.: “The feeling, the emotion of the moment, the vitality. I love portraits – people in their environment with lights, beautiful lights.

He’s encountered plenty of people “who don’t understand the cost, all the equipment,” he said. “Digital photography put photography in everyone’s hands. But unless the people are literate in what good photography is, anything will be ‘good enough.’”

But those who seek out Lee’s precision work “will be those who want quality in every aspect of their business, ” he said.

He is branching into the advertising world. He makes it a point to stay in contact with all his former colleagues, and with contacts he made at the Chron.

“That has given me a kind of press I could never buy,” he said. “The food and wine individuals, they know who I am.”

He has counsel for other photographers who are going independent.  “Blogging affords a personal way to talk to people, and “the more upbeat your website is the better it is.”

As for clients, “use a database. Seek out nationwide people who buy art and photography. Check out national magazines. Focus on your best skills; you want to be a go-to person with a specialty.”

See more of Craig’s work at craigleephoto.com.

In Northern California alone, hundreds of journalists have been displaced from their longtime jobs. Many tried to hang onto their chosen profession by working as freelancers — providing a ready source of affordable labor for the region’s newsrooms.

Rebecca Rosen Lum

But with pay eroding and competition increasing, the arrangement is starting to feel less than sustainable for many veteran writers, reporters, editors and photographers. In a survey conducted by GuildFreelancers this spring, 60 percent say freelance jobs pay less than they used to, and nearly half agree that freelance work is getting harder to find.

Our freelance unit chair, Rebecca Rosen Lum, explores the problem in this morning’s California Progress Report. Click here to read the full story.

In her most recent reportage, an eight-part series for Oakland Local, Grady and two colleagues gauge the recession’s effect on sexual trafficking. She was staggered by what they found: As the economy has tanked, trafficking has boomed, claiming ever younger victims with ever more violent means.

“There are more families in trouble, so more kids run away,” said Grady, a member of GuildFreelancers. “And there is less money going into foster care. In addition, government has less money to fight crime.”

The editors at Oakland Local had followed her coverage of sexual exploitation of minors for the Oakland Tribune, which netted Grady and colleagues Kamika Dunlap and Tammerlin Drummond a 2009 Sigma Delta Chi award from the national Society of Professional Journalists.

At the urging of Oakland Local, Grady and partners Sarah Terry-Cobo and photographer Alison Yin secured a grant from G.W. Williams Center for Independent Journalism, a project of the Tides Center, to follow the story.

Some things hadn’t changed: The exploited girls were primarily foster youth or runaways, homeless and struggling to survive, she said. But the recession had brought sobering changes. A law passed in 2008 to help victims of sex trafficking is a legislative hull without the resources necessary to implement it fully. Without adequate funds, Oakland’s plans for a safe house idled (a faith group has helped fill the breach). And as funds have vaporized, the Internet has fueled a take-off in commercial sexual exploitation, Grady said.

“If you look at the erotic section of Craigslist, a lot of those women are actually underage,” she said. “The police recognized some of the kids from their pictures. The pimps all use laptops to sell these children.”

Interviewing the girls as they waited for customers — men from all walks of life, classes and races — was the biggest challenge Grady’s team faced.

“They’re being watched all the time,” Grady said. “It’s dangerous for us, but taking time to talk to a non-customer really puts the girl in a dangerous position. We would have very quick conversations. We had a few 15-second conversations. Or we talked with them when they were in a police staging. A couple of times we had interviews set up, but then they wouldn’t show up.”

The team negotiated some police ride-alongs, which helped connect them with the girls in a safe setting. “We worked on (the series) for several months,” Grady said. “We did way more reporting than we could use in this series … We were all working on other projects, but then at the end, I’d say for the last two or three weeks that’s all we were doing. “Emotionally, it was very difficult. At the end, we felt burnt out. It was traumatic in some ways.”

Before her tenure at the Oakland Tribune, Grady reported for Reuters New Service and wrote for magazines during the dot-com era. Today, as a freelancer, Grady covers environment and community affairs.

“I very much enjoyed working with another reporter and a photojournalist on this project and much prefer working with others than working alone,” she said. “Sarah, Alison and I made a great team. We all saw eye-to-eye on things and all shared an ambition to go all out on this, taking physical risks in order to get the story and working many more hours than was originally envisioned.

“Freelancing can be lonely. So, joining up with another reporter or photographer on a project is a great way to get around that inherent aspect of freelancing. Also, as journalists we know that brainstorming is always useful and that two sets of eyes reading copy is always better than one.”

–Rebecca Rosen Lum, freelance unit chair

(Story by Sara Steffens and Rebecca Rosen Lum, Photos by Russ Cain)

About 120 participants gathered Saturday at City College of San Francisco for the first “Spring Training for Journalists,” a daylong workshop we hope will become an annual tradition for news staffers, freelancers and students throughout our region.

This year’s offering, “Reinventing Your Career,” covered the job and technology skills demanded by a fast-changing news profession. Top-flight instructors ran seminars on topics such as entry-level multimedia, audio production basics and working with interpreters to report on underserved communities.

Steve Fainaru (photo), who won a 2008 Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on military contractors in Iraq, kicked it off Saturday morning by explaining why he gave up his gig at the Washington Post to take on a radically different assignment: managing editor in charge of news at the Bay Citizen, the nonprofit startup the Guild helped to create in the interest of quality journalism.

Investigative reporter Steve Fainaru (top) and photojournalist Kim Komenich, both Pulitzer winners, share their knowledge.

A partnership of philanthropist Warren Hellman and the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, Bay Citizen is set to launch May 26 with a new website and twice-weekly Bay Area content in The New York Times. Fainaru said he wanted to foster local journalism marked by as much ambition and skill as daily newspapers at their best. And he explained how freelancers will be a critical part of the new operation, supplementing a core staff of about 15 journalists to start.

One of the most crowded among six break-out sessions, “Driving Web Traffic,” led by Wired.com Science Editor Betsy Mason and Knight Digital Media Center Webmaster Scot Hacker, outlined how social networking and HTML coding can be used to help build an online audience.

Click here for the full story.

If you’re ready to upgrade your skills and reinvent your career, join us at our inaugural:

Spring Training for Journalists
9 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday April 24
SF City College – Ocean Campus
50 Phelan Avenue
San Francisco.

Steve Fainaru

Davia Nelson

A top-notch lineup of speakers and presenters will tackle topics ranging from driving Web traffic to your work to getting started in multimedia, revamping your resume, and overcoming language and culture barriers. The day will open with remarks by Steve Fainaru, the managing editor of The Bay Citizen; our keynote speaker is Davia Nelson, best known for her work as half of NPR’s award-winning documentary duo, the Kitchen Sisters.

You can download a PDF of the full schedule here, and read presenter biographies here.

Best of all: admission is free to all Guild members, including members of Guild Freelancers. San Francisco City College journalism students also get in free; others pay $20 with advance registration, or $25 at the door.

Spring training is sponsored by California Media Workers Guild, the SF City College Journalism Department, and the Bay Area Media Training Consortium.

Send us a note to register. Watch this site for details, or become our fan on Facebook. Here’s a flyer you can download.

]]> http://guildfreelancers.org/gf/archives/550/feed 0 http://guildfreelancers.org/gf/archives/541 http://guildfreelancers.org/gf/archives/541#comments Tue, 06 Apr 2010 19:36:29 +0000 Sara http://guildfreelancers.org/gf/?p=541

By Rebecca Rosen Lum
Freelance Unit Chair

Fred Merkle was a 19-year-old rookie when the (then-New York) Giants played the Cubs on Sept. 23, 1908. Victory appeared certain when a decisive run crossed home plate. But instead of stepping on second base, Merkle made a run for the clubhouse – just as 10,000 fans streamed onto the field.

Where the game ball landed is anyone’s guess. At the Cubs’ behest, the ump declared Merkle out. The game was replayed, and the Cubs triumphed and went on to win the World Series. The National League president who ordered the replay was so excoriated by fans that he committed suicide within the year. Merkle endured heckling for decades afterward, and “Merkle’s Boner” became an indelible part of Giants history.

Dan Fost and his son on research duty.

“One of the fascinating things about baseball is that it is a sport of failure,” said Guild freelancer and die-hard Giants fan Dan Fost, whose “Giants: Past and Present” hit bookstores this month. “If you fail seven times out of 10, you are one of the greats.”

Fost had long nurtured an idea to write a book chronicling the 125-year history of the Giants – heartbreaks, gaffes and glories. When San Francisco magazine published his story commemorating the ball club’s 50th anniversary in the City, it caught the attention of MVP Books, a publishing company with a series of ball club profiles to its credit. They needed it turned around in two months.

No problem: “I had half the work done already,” Fost said. “I had notebooks full of stuff. My whole dining room became a baseball library.”

The project presented an opportunity “to play in the toy department” for Fost, the former sports editor of his college newspaper. In his life as a metro, features and business reporter, he has coveredjust about everything but sports. He developed a niche as a technology and business writer at the Marin Independent Journal and later the San Francisco Chronicle.

“The nice part of leaving the Chron was it gave me the chance to reinvent myself,” he said. “The Chron already has a whole slew of great sports writers. I was in the business section. It was great to be able to research and write this story.”

Fost had been working three days a week at the Chron, which was once a reporter’s choice. When the company renegotiated its contract, part-timers were reeled back into full time. But they had a full year’s notice. For Fost, that was enough time to see whether freelancing could work for him. By the time a year had lapsed, the paper was offering buyouts, and he took one without a second thought.

“I did a story at the Chron once on digital nomads, and now I am one,” he said. “All it takes is a laptop and a cell phone.”

The beauty of writing “Giants Past and Present” is that MVP provided him with a defined template for his myriad stories.

“I want people to read that book and get a sense of who John McGraw was, who Willie Mays was,” he said.

And who Barry Bonds is. Fost says he is owed a place in the Hall of Fame.

“I loved watching that guy play,” he said. “It’s sad. It’s a Greek tragedy.”

And there is Fred Snodgrass, who dropped the ball that cost the Giants the World Series in 1912. He went on to serve as mayor of Oxnard, Calif. But the fumble dogged him.

“It’s a cruel sport when your greatest failures follow you to your grave: ‘Fred Snodgrass, who muffed a ball in 1912, dies.’”

Before the book’s first printing, Fost launched a Facebook page – “We all have to learn all these social media tools” – and he hears from a lively mix of friends, former colleagues, and die-hard fans he’s never met face-to-face. Now, the readings and the book-signings begin.

His first takes place in New Jersey at the Yogi Berra Museum and Learning Center at Montclair State University. Then back home to Marin to Book Passage in Corte Madera. (Click here for a schedule).

One thing he didn’t have to worry about: Striking a balance between working on the book and spending quality time with his son.

Harry Barker-Fost, 10, accompanies his old man to the ballpark with glee. When he wasn’t playing in Little League games, he took promo photos and helped proofread the book.

For Fost, succeeding at freelancing requires an entirely different mindset than clocking in at a metro paper.

“You’ve got to maintain confidence in your ability — and let everybody know you are freelancing. You’ve got to keep up your old contacts so you know where the stories are. The more you put yourself out there, the more good things come to you. There is more work coming to me than I can do.”

Love baseball history? Become a Facebook fan of Giants Past and Present, or follow the book on Twitter to stay up to date on readings and other events.

By Rebecca Rosen Lum
Freelance Unit Chair
California Media Workers Guild

It withstood a fusillade of hyperbole by Republicans, a blitz of oppositional advertisements by the insurance industry, and the relentless internal chipping away of Democratic concessions.

But at last, a comprehensive health care reform bill has been signed into law, and many independent journalists are greeting the watershed moment with exuberance, relief and hope.

Passage of the ground-breaking bill caps off a 100-year struggle by labor, health care advocates and consumers.

Not a moment too soon for freelancers, many of whom lost coverage when they lost their newsroom jobs. As COBRA coverage runs out, many have discovered what veteran freelancers knew all along: Individual policies are prohibitively expensive.

“You can’t play nice with these people,” said East Bay freelancer Tim Kingston, reflecting on conservative opposition. “When Obama got that, we got somewhere.”

This bill “reassures workers that their families won’t lose health care if they change jobs or are laid off,” said CWA president Larry Cohen in his response. “It stops the worst abuses of insurance companies, like denying care based on pre-existing conditions, setting lifetime limits for coverage and dropping coverage when people need it most.”

The flagship in President Barack Obama’s promised fleet of reforms passed the House of Representatives by seven votes late Sunday despite rancorous opposition by Republicans and a million-dollar advertising blitz by the insurance industry.

“There seems to be a recognition in the new health care bill that ‘self-employed’ people have been having a rough time of it,” San Francisco-based freelance photographer Darryl Bush said in an email message. “Now with this new law, we are at least recognized as a part of the mass of people that need to be addressed in reform.”

Uninsured journalists are cheering the changes that take effect immediately, such as a ban on lifetime dollar limits.

Come 2014, the self-employed, small business owners and the uninsured can join “exchanges,” or purchasing pools, overseen by states. Those who join an exchange can enroll in a national health plan, much like the one that serves Congress.

“For self-employed people (the exchanges) are a good thing,” said Bryan Aycock, assistant vice president of health and benefits for AON Consulting. “They’ll get a better rate than if they went out and bought a policy on their own.”

The self-employed must purchase health insurance or ante up a $695 yearly fine. Yet exemptions and subsidies offer relief.

“I don’t get the whole of the bill, but I feel encouraged,” said Los Angeles-based broadcast production veteran Ana Maria Bahia. “It’s not just a gesture alone, it’s a step in the right direction.”

Bahia shares a common experience with many freelancers: She pays a steep premium for individual coverage, then gets battered by bills since exceptions and exemptions pepper her policy.

“You pay, then you pay,” she said. “And everything is a pre-existing condition.”.

“I think the most important thing for freelancers is that three months from when the law takes effect, they can get subsidized health insurance from high-risk exchanges if they’ve been denied in the individual market because of pre-existing conditions,” said Barbara Feder Ostrov, deputy editor of Reporting on Health and former medical writer at the San Jose Mercury News. “But general insurance exchanges (for people priced out of the individual market) and subsidies for low income people won’t start until 2014.”

The new law requires insurers to spend 80 percent of premiums on direct care to health care consumers. As profit margins are capped, premiums will inevitably decrease, predicted Sarah Flocks, public policy coordinator for the California State Labor Federation.

“Because of regulation, of the automobile insurance industry when California passed Proposition 103 in 1988, we went from having some of the highest premiums in the county to some of the lowest,” she said.

Organized labor won a substantial cut to an excise tax on high-cost policies that targeted union benefit plans and instead levy only the wealthiest Americans. Unions also secured special consideration for fields in which older workers dominate.

In addition to its remedies, the new law provides “a framework for future improvements,” the CWA’s Cohen said.

“I hope that the new health-care insurance reform at the federal level allows the states to be able to pass single-payer health care,” said Sacramento-based writer Seth Sandronsky. “Self-employed workers whose income varies from month to month would be one of the many groups of Americans that would benefit much from a single-payer system.”

Kingston, who grew up in England with national health care, agrees.

“It’s so far away from what we need, which is single payer,” he said. “Having said that, we have to start somewhere.”

Highlights of the health care reform bill:

• Small businesses will receive tax cuts this year, to help bear the costs of health coverage for employees.
• Seniors will receive a rebate to reduce drug costs not yet covered under Medicare.
• Young people will be allowed coverage under their parents’ plan until the age of 26.
• Early retirees will receive help to reduce premium costs.
• Children will be protected against discrimination on the basis of medical history.
• Uninsured Americans with pre-existing conditions can join a special high-risk pool to get the coverage they need, starting in 90 days.
• Insured Americans will be protected from seeing their insurance revoked when they get sick, or facing restrictive annual limits on the care they receive.
• All Americans will benefit from new investments to train primary care doctors, nurses, and public health professionals, and the creation of state-level consumer assistance programs to help all patients understand and defend our new rights.

Source: The Obama administration

Learn more about health care reform:

Analysis by Physicians for a National Health Program
Reporting on Health’s blog post on how the new law affects individuals
New York Times primer on what provisions take effect and when
New York Times: How the health care overhaul could affect you

author photo by Katy Raddatz

Entwined with the Mexico of maquiladoras, drug wars and immigration coyotes is a Mexico in which artists paint, green energy firms run wind farms, and a national forest thrives.

In her new book, “The Wind Doesn’t Need a Passport: Stories from the U.S.-Mexico Border,” Tyche Hendricks introduces readers to the full spectrum. She writes about a land and culture that is complex, organic, many faceted.

Mexico is as poorly understood as the border that divides it from the United States, said Hendricks, a member of GuildFreelancers.

“We think of the border as this line,” she said. “The reality of the border is that it’s a region. The border forms an axis to the region. A lot of the people (on both sides) have bi-national lives. They shop, go to the dentist, work on one or the other side.”

As a result, “They are more skilled at how we work in the common interest, in mutual interest.”

Each chapter of “The Wind Doesn’t Need a Passport” focuses on a different issue:  The maquiladoras, health care, water and energy (the southwestern grid includes areas on both sides of the border).

The book grew out of the expansive newspaper take-outs Hendricks generated as immigration and demographics reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. If drug wars account for 99 percent of the media coverage of Mexico, her new work suggests, the lives of 99 percent of residents are dominated by other issues.

Writing the book was a three-year effort, requiring a dramatic change in the way the veteran journalist conceives and realizes a project. Even generating long-form pieces doesn’t quite prepare a reporter for structuring a non-fiction book, “not only in terms of length but literary narrative,” she said. “Non-fiction writing is more about character, creating a narrative arc.”

And “in a book, there is an imperative to develop a point of view,” she said. “That’s been a big mental shift.”

Ultimately she discovered that the newspaper represents only one model for producing in-depth journalism.

Since leaving the Chronicle, Hendricks’ vibrant career has sprouted at least two new branches: She will be coordinating coverage of state governance for “The California Report” as the newly named special projects editor at KQED-FM. And she has been teaching a hands-on course in covering Mexico at UC Berkeley, at the invitation of Neil Henry, dean of the School of Journalism.

She had her students begin the semester by reporting on the Bay Area Mexican community. She took them to Mexico in December to learn depth reporting. They’ve become adept at what she calls “backpack journalism.” Now back home, the students are writing their pieces and crafting a Web site on which to showcase them.

“It’s fun to learn something new,” Hendricks said. “It’s engaging.

“I’ve had the newspaper chapter of my journalism career. I’m launching a new chapter.”

GuildFreelancers is surveying area freelancers to learn more about their lives, work and the local marketplace.

The resulting data will help us raise awareness about current issues facing freelancers, and will also help us tailor services to your needs. The 20-question survey is posted online and takes only about 15 minutes to complete.

Ready to take part? Click here.

But publishers’ beeline away from skilled journalists toward everymen who will work for free or cheap is part of a larger trend that serves ultimately to torpedo democracy. For without a robust, untethered and principled news media, the idea of democracy is just that – an idea. An exercise in theory.

It should come as no surprise that enterprising, rigorous journalism — the kind that nourishes a democracy — is costly. It’s costly because it is time-consuming and labor-intensive, and requires skill, both depth and breadth of knowledge, resourcefulness, vetting. That’s before we even get to writing with elegance and impact.

Seldom a day goes by that a posting does not appear on Craigslist seeking skilled writers so bursting with “passion” for the topic at hand that they are willing to devote hours of investigative reporting for the thrill of “exposure.” Ironically, many of these employers represent do-good nonprofit organizations, such as “JustMeans,” which offers roughly two cents a word for the thrice-weekly, quality postings it demands.

Resist, cried news media analyst Alan Mutter.

Mutter (“Reflections of a Newsosaur”) lit a match to a combustible topic this week when he pilloried publishers, including online content providers, for failing to pay journalists an honest buck for an honest day’s work – and challenged journalists to reject substandard pay. Read his full column here.

“It’s time for journalists to stop participating in their own exploitation by working for a pittance – or, worse, giving away their valuable services for free,” Mutter wrote.

Publishers are also seeking more secondary rights for the same buck that once secured one-time rights, a critical change for freelance journalists, who maximized their earnings by reselling stories in multiple markets. Magazine fees have been on a downward slide for decades (One of the nation’s top-paying publications, Good Housekeeping, paid $1 a word for 40 years). Trails.com pays $15 for articles about the outdoors; livestrong.com $30 for 500-word pieces on health, writes the L.A. Times’ James Rainey in his recent piece “Freelance Writing’s Unfortunate New Model.”

“The crumbling pay scales have not only hollowed out household budgets but accompanied a pervasive shift in journalism toward shorter stories, frothier subjects and an increasing emphasis on fast, rather than thorough,” Rainey writes.

Of course, students and recent grads have long produced stories to get clips and exposure. Nothing new about that. But add to that population the number of out-of-work, experienced professionals and tanking advertising dollars, and you’ve got a set-up for exploitation.

Mutter writes that part of the problem is that we don’t value ourselves as professionals. As a reality check, we can try on the idea that it makes good sense in this tanking economy to promote legions of “citizen urban planners” or “citizen surgeons.”

Are we joining that range of low-paid workers Barbara Ehrenreich chronicled in her groundbreaking  book “Nickel and Dimed,” doomed to toil at umpteen low-paying jobs to make ends meet? Is being paid per click the journalist equivalent of the sweatshop in which seamstresses are paid by the piece?

Not always, cautions San Francisco tech writer Bill Snyder, who has done well with at least one pay-per-click website.

“The only way to know whether this is essentially legitimate, or potentially exploitative, is to have some experience with the company,” Snyder said. “Without it, who knows? Which is why it makes a great deal of sense to track freelance employers and share the intelligence” with others.

At Guild Freelancers, that’s the plan.

One of our primary goals is to develop a “Fair Freelance” certification for employers who value our work. The sites that pay two cents a word — if that — will find themselves listed on our Wall of Shame — and the recipients of an Amnesty International-style, polite-but-frank letter barrage.

And thanks to Mutter, who thoughtfully provided a spreadsheet template for with his rant, we can calculate our worth.

“Journalists need to stand together – and stand tall – to reassert the stature of their profession,” Mutter writes. “The reason is simple: If they don’t put a value on what they do, then no one else will, either.”