Getting your foot in the door

I am probably not telling you anything you don’t already know when I say it’s gotten very difficult to break into newspaper photography. Hiring of new staff has reduced to nearly non-existent and work for freelancers has dried up almost entirely too.

Redundancy programs and uncompensated attrition for a decade has meant many newspaper photo departments are less than half their former selves. But what hasn’t changed is the number of people who want in, and while it’s not impossible to get hired, long gone are the days when you could just fall into the trade.

As discouraging as this sounds it’s not entirely grim. In Australia there continues to be a strong appetite for newspapers and while that remains publishers will continue to produce them. Whether it be in print or online, those publications will need pictures for which they’ll continue to need photographers. The trade will survive — there will just be less of us.

As far as getting hired is concerned, where there’s a will there’s a way. Here are some tips to help you get your foot in the door.

• Show them you can shoot it all

If there is a key quality of the press photographer it’s diversity. Being able to turn your hand to a wide variety of assignments and produce a page one picture from most of them is the job description in a nutshell. And now more than ever you’ll need to be a jack of all trades. The days of shooting sport or portraiture alone, or any other specialty for that matter, are largely behind us. Having less staff has produced much more of a first-cab off the rank system.

So flexibility must shine through in the portfolio that you show. They’ll want to see evidence you can shoot it all: spot news, features, portraiture with and without lights, sport and still life. You need diversity to be employable.

• Make it clear you know what you’re getting yourself into

It pays to demonstrate you really do understand the job that you’re trying to land. The romanticized, even novelised notion of the uncompromising, globetrotting photojournalist is largely false advertising.

Almost nobody makes a living out of that anymore and photojournalism is only a distant cousin to press photography anyway. While working for a big newspaper may potentially and eventually take you to any of many an exotic locale, you should realise that for every day of your career spent in a war zone you’ll endure many dozens in front of a Court.

As in any job interview, an editor will want to know you have a realistic understanding of the position on offer. They wouldn’t want to find you moving on, disillusioned because of unmet expectations in six or twelve months’ time.

• Having a touch of geek about you won’t hurt at all

Our work has become so dependent on technology that having an advanced grasp of it has become a core requirement. Photoshop is obviously the new darkroom but it goes well beyond post production. As a press photographer remote filing is par for the course. When it comes to troubleshooting the technology that enables you to do this in the field, you’re often out there by yourself while the paper is waiting. Getting the pictures back is as important as getting them in the first place.

You’ll want to be able to drive whatever computer is put in front of you and there will be a need to employ all manner of communications technologies: 3G data-cards, Wi-Fi, ISDN, dial-up and satellite phones. And you’ll need to be able to troubleshoot them when things go wrong.

Of course you’ll be trained on all of this but hopefully the idea of recovering pictures from corrupted cards or re-pairing a bluetooth device to your notebook with just ten minutes to deadline doesn’t leave you in a cold sweat.

• Yes, ‘who you know’ does helps

As in so many other scenarios, relationships matter enormously. It’s not common that a photographer gets hired without the personal endorsement of someone on staff who they may know through the wider photographic community, or because they’ve been working with you for a while as a freelancer. There is indeed an element of ‘who you know’.

This doesn’t mean to say you need to be the editor’s niece, rather that it pays to get to know the people on your newspaper of interest one way or another. A traditional route for emerging photographers or graduates is through work-experience at first, followed by a spot of freelance work and uncommisioned submissions. Then, have the odd coffee from time to time after that.

• Make an impression — in person

If you receive 20,000 emails a year as do I, you’ll understand that efforts to get noticed via an email inbox are less likely to succeed than more old fashioned methods like snail-mail and a telephone call.

I would not recommend ‘friending’ somebody on Facebook unless you’re actually a friend. Nor would I add them to an email distribution list they haven’t asked to be part of. But I would suggest asking for a five minute appointment to show your portfolio and hand over your business card. You’d be surprised how uncommon that is. So much so you’ll immediately stand out from the competition.

• Ultimately it’s your pictures that will do the talking

Having said all of this, consistently great photographs can compensate for any thing. We’re here to put the best pictures in front of the readers day in, day out. Everything else is at least to some degree secondary.

As the man who hired me, former SMH Photographic Editor Mike Bowers, said: “it is — and always will be — about the pictures.”