Photography

The Vanishing Local Newsrooms The place Photographers Barely Exist

- by fooshya

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Two women sit at cluttered desks with computers in an office; to the right, shelves display vintage cameras, an old radio, and an American flag. A "Donnaruma Way" sign hangs on the wall behind them.
Work within the Post-Gazette newsroom in Boston, left, a set of previous digicam gear sits on show in The Emporia Gazette newsroom in Kansas, proper.

Photographer Ann Hermes calls her undertaking Local Newsrooms a love letter to group journalism, but it surely’s additionally an vital documentation of a fast-disappearing business.

The on-line internet web page, such because the one you’re studying this text on, has lengthy supplanted print media as the preferred means individuals get their information. But print continues to carry on — particularly in rural areas serving an older viewers.

An older man carries a large stack of newspapers outside a brick building labeled "Post-Gazette North End Printing" as a woman stands in the doorway behind him.
Louie Graffeo delivers copies of The Post-Gazette for his girlfriend, writer and editor, Pamela Donnaruma in Boston, Massachusetts.
Stacks of bundled newspapers and paper packets are piled high in a cluttered basement with exposed pipes, wires, and electrical panels. Handwritten labels with dates are visible on many of the bundles.
The Post-Gazette newspaper morgue sits within the cellar beneath the newsroom.
Two men sit across from each other at separate desks in an office, working on computers. The desks are cluttered with papers and office supplies. The room has pink blinds, framed photos, and certificates on the walls.
Alameda Sun reporter, Ekene Ikeme, left, and co-publisher, Dennis Evanosky, proper, work on deadline in Alameda, California. The paper is now closed.

While some native newsrooms survive on a skeleton workers of two or three individuals, these hardy souls are usually information writers. Hermes tells PetaPixel that out of the 50 native newspapers she visited, not rather more than 5 nonetheless had picture departments.

“I can’t tell you how many newsrooms I’ve walked into, where the reporters will come to me with their cameras and say, ‘Can you show me how to use this?’” Hermes says.

Hermes minimize her tooth as a press photographer in native newsrooms much like those she has been documenting.

“We are the first ones to go in most newsrooms,” Hermes says of the plight of photographers. “We’re seen as not as important or not as needed… But you can’t really blame a lot of these newsrooms because we’re talking about papers that are working with a staff of two or three.”

“It breaks my heart because I look at these small newsrooms in small towns that have no visual staff whatsoever, meaning they don’t have any photographers.”

A man sits sideways on an office chair with one leg up on a wooden desk, using a laptop. He is looking to the side. A water bottle and a poster are on the desk. The setting appears to be a casual office.
Reporter Duncan Freeman at his desk in The Chief newsroom in New York.
A woman in white pants and black heels walks past three weathered newspaper dispensers on a city sidewalk, next to a concrete wall, holding a white jacket and cellphone.
The Santa Monica Daily Press newspaper bins.
Two people sort newspapers on a table in front of a wall decorated with large round buttons arranged like a vintage typewriter keyboard. A "ROYAL" sign hangs above the buttons.
From left, North County News workers Joel and Jesse Heidel kind the newspaper and fasten mailers within the newsroom in Red Bud, Illinois. The regionally owned newspaper went from a workers of six to 4 up to now decade.

For Local Newsrooms, Hermes visited extra rural newspapers than metros. That’s partly as a result of a family-owned operation is extra doubtless to offer her entry. She additionally finds extra “interesting things happening on the local level” than in a giant metropolis.

“I do seek [rural newsrooms] out, especially when they are near a news desert,” Hermes says. “There’s some great research that’s been done to locate counties that are news desert counties. So I try to find rural newspapers that are either right up against a news desert county or are about to become a news desert.”

While analysis on information deserts carried out by the Columbia Journalism Review and Poynter is complete, Hermes wished to construct “robust visual coverage” of the problem to help the literature.

“I also selfishly just wanted to capture these spaces and people that I find admirable and endearing and have a lot of care for,” she provides. “I wanted to dedicate my time to photographing something that I love and I hope that love letter style comes through in the images that I made.”

A wooden mail organizer with dozens of cubbyholes, each filled with rolled newspapers or magazines, neatly arranged in rows. The cubbies are labeled with small paper tags.
Newspaper morgue in The Marion County Record newsroom.
Two people sit at a desk; one types on a laptop while the other holds a camera, showing it to the first person. A water bottle and woven baskets are also visible on the desk.
From left, reporter Adam Drapcho and photographer Jon Decker talk about tales throughout an editorial assembly in The Laconia Daily Sun newsroom Laconia, New Hampshire.
A woman in a red leopard print shirt sits at a desk, talking on the phone and writing notes. Her desk is cluttered with papers. Other people are working at desks in the background.
J. the Jewish News of Northern California reporter, Maya Mirsky, makes for a narrative from her desk within the newsroom in San Francisco.
A man in a blue hoodie works intently on a laptop at a desk cluttered with a drink, tissue box, camera, and water bottle. Behind him is a large black-and-white mural of office workers at desks with typewriters.
Sports reporter John Sorce works at his desk in The Emporia Gazette newsroom in Emporia, Kansas.

Hermes says she approached Local Newsrooms a lot the identical means she would a standard photojournalism task, besides she brings studio lighting along with her.

“Because most of these spaces have fluorescent lights that are abysmal to work with,” she explains. “I wanted to elevate the themes to be a little bit more cinematic. And I also wanted you to be able to see every nook and cranny, every coffee stain on the carpet. I wanted the audience to see just how workaday these places are.”

Studio lights can typically show detrimental to a photograph shoot; sometimes intimidating the topic. But Hermes says information persons are the “perfect subject” to work with.

“You don’t have to explain what you’re doing to them; they already get it,” she says. It’s enabled Hermes to make work that’s genuine and candid as a result of journalists are prepared to be genuine and candid in entrance of the digicam.

A small American flag is attached to a metal shelf stacked with several piles of folded newspapers. The newspapers are organized into two columns on the gray shelves.
The newspaper morgue in The Bradenton Herald newsroom in Florida.
Two people sit at separate desks in a busy office. The man on the left looks at his phone, while the woman on the right, holding paperwork, looks back at him. The office is filled with shelves, cabinets, and office supplies.
Alameda Sun proprietor, Eric Kos and replica editor Veronica Hall study proofs of the weekly newspaper earlier than sending it to the printing press.
A row of yellow and blue newspaper vending machines stands in front of a red wall with a visible crack running down the center. The ground is paved, and the sky is clear and blue above.
Broken newspaper bins sit within the parking zone of The Auburn Journal in California. The newspaper sits shut to 2 information desert counties.

Newsrooms are filled with quirks: a number of the ones Hermes visited nonetheless had the printing press connected to the newsrooms, even when they weren’t all the time operational.

“In one newsroom I visited, they had turned it into a video production room, but they kept the old printing press with the last edition still on the press. Like a memorial. I thought that was a nice juxtaposition.”

Hermes says she’s a “little obsessed” with newspaper morgues, an area paper’s archive of all its editions.

“In a lot of cases, the only record of this entire town’s history is right there,” says Hermes. “In a lot of cases, it’s never been digitized. So I wanted to capture a lot of those spaces because I thought they were really interesting.”

Tall, uneven stacks of old, yellowed newspapers are piled by a window, with sunlight streaming through. The newspapers appear worn and fragile, and the surrounding area looks cluttered.
The Conway Daily Sun newspaper morgue in Conway, New Hampshire.
A man works at a desk in an office behind a glass wall. In the foreground, shelves display newspapers and magazines. Above, a large sign reads "Owensboro Messenger and Inquirer.
Messenger-Inquirer editor, Don Wilkins, works from his desk within the newsroom in Owensboro, Kentucky.
A woman with glasses works at a desk in an office cubicle, while a man sits at a desk in a separate office behind a glass partition filled with papers and folders. Both appear focused on their tasks.
Auburn Journal reporter, Stacey Adams works on deadline within the Auburn Journal newsroom on July 10, 2023 in Auburn, California.

Fittingly, Hermes met her husband whereas working in a newsrooms and was pregnant for a lot of her undertaking. More of her work will be discovered on her website and Instagram.

Image credit: Photographs by Ann Hermes




This web page was created programmatically, to learn the article in its unique location you possibly can go to the hyperlink bellow:
https://petapixel.com/2026/01/03/the-vanishing-local-newsrooms-where-photographers-barely-exist-ann-hermes/
and if you wish to take away this text from our website please contact us

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