When Ann Hermes graduated from journalism school in 2008 and launched her career as a professional photojournalist, she already sensed that local news was in trouble. Over the next 15 years as a staff photographer for the Christian Science Monitor — and assignments for The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and other titles — she witnessed the industry’s upheaval firsthand.
While at the Christian Science Monitor, Hermes survived two sweeping layoffs.
“We were in an older part of the building, and we’d have to walk past the desks of the people who had been let go. Psychologically, that does something to you,” Hermes said.
By 2016, the Brooklyn, New York-based news photographer felt she had to expressly document what was happening to local newsrooms around the country. It was a time when phrases like “fake news” became part of the national vernacular, and journalists were often portrayed as ivory-tower elitists.
“The latter really struck me as funny, because I had worked in local newsrooms,” Hermes recalled. “These people could not be more embedded in their communities. They come from their communities. They grocery shop in the same stores as their readers.”
A familiar conversation further inspired Hermes.
“My first visit was to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which was technically my hometown paper. I’m from Southern Illinois, right outside of St. Louis, within the distribution area. My family had been subscribing to that paper for a very long time, and they were complaining to me that they felt it was ‘all wire stories.’ [The Post-Dispatch] had just won the Pulitzer for their coverage of Ferguson, and so I asked the photo department if I could come by and visit. And when I walked into the newsroom, which I had never been in, there was a sea of empty carpet, with the outlines of where desks had been,” Hermes recounted to E&P. “I thought, if I took this picture, I could explain to my family why they’re seeing more wire stories.”
Hermes’ “Local Newsrooms” photo series has since taken her to more than 50 newsrooms around the country — many that seem hollowed-out versions of their former selves.
“I’ve seen newsrooms that have maybe 30 empty cubicles and only three working staff people,” she said.
But there’s so much more than mere erosion conveyed in Hermes’ photographs. Among them, one finds resilience, humor, camaraderie, plus a lot of focused, busy people.
And paper everywhere. Despite being 30-years deep in the Digital Era, the news business still uses and produces a lot of paper.
Hermes also curated a collection of images, “The Presses,” taken at printing plants still producing newspapers.
Often, she observed, these pressrooms are serving as regional hubs, printing other newspapers from around the area and taking on commercial print work — things like yearbooks, brochures, booklets and marketing materials — to help sustain their newsrooms.
“One of the interesting newspapers I visited was the Rutland Herald [in Rutland, Vermont]. … They were having their newspapers printed in Canada, because there was no place nearby to print,” Hermes said.
These scenarios, in which newspapers are printed far from their distribution markets, make it increasingly difficult for news organizations to service their print subscribers, to maintain their print schedules and frequency, and to provide timely news in their print editions.
During her travels, Hermes heard from news publishers that carriers are hard to come by and too expensive to employ, anyway. She recounted a conversation with one local news publisher, whose boyfriend delivers the paper every Thursday for her.
For Hermes, this project has been both creatively inspiring and challenging.
“As a news photographer, you’re really ‘run and gun,’ you know? You can’t bring fancy lights. You’ve gotta do what you can in whatever circumstance. … I wanted to take on a project that challenged me, lighting wise,” she explained.
Newsrooms are often plagued by harsh or dim lighting, so she carts in her own studio-quality equipment.
“I understand how newsrooms work, because I worked in them myself. I usually spend anywhere from four to eight hours in a particular newsroom, so there’s enough time for candid moments to unfold,” she said.
In her bio, Hermes notes that she has “a flair for the nostalgic.” “Local Newsrooms” and “The Presses” demonstrate her talent for capturing a sense of the past while working in the present.
“Hopefully, I’m nostalgic in a way that is also realistic, by seeing what’s very much likely going to die, but what shouldn’t die, what should be converted and ushered into the future,” Hermes said.
Despite what Hermes qualified as “a discouraging amount of our industry operating in the past,” she’s also documented a lot of newsrooms doing “extremely innovative things.”
“Local Newsrooms” was first exhibited in Keene, New Hampshire. The Keene Sentinel is chronicled in her work. She also showed at the Photoville Festival in Brooklyn.
Reflecting on the decade-long project, Hermes said, “It’s been, in part, a sort of love letter to journalism. It’s funny. It’s meant to be sweet and enduring and quirky, because I find newsrooms and the people who work in them to be all of those things. But it is also meant to be a way to communicate to people who are not part of this world, ‘Hey, look at how much these people are doing with so few resources! And even those little resources they do have are now dwindling. Have you thought about your local newspaper and what it means for your community if you lose it?’”
Gretchen A. Peck is E&P’s editor-in-chief. She welcomes your emails at editor@editorandpublisher.com.
Comments
No comments on this item Please log in to comment by clicking here