By Christopher B. Daly  Don’t miss: if you are a historian, researcher, or dedicated browser, visit the new flickr site of The British Library. The library recently made news by posting more than 1 million historic images — all digitized, all in the public domain, and all available for use now. Plus, there’s metadata for each one. The site is not as easy to navigate (it’s actually a bit overwhelming) as the U.S. Library of Congress site for the Prints & Photographs Division, but I’m hardly complaining. It’s also based on flickr, so you need to have an account to take full advantage ..read more

By Christopher B. Daly  For all those reporters, photographers, videographers and others who end up covering Hurricane Irma (or any of the other intense storms that the climate throws our way), here is a quick guide to staying safe while on assignment. These are tips that I picked up during my decades as a reporter for The Associated Press and The Washington Post, along with suggestions from my colleagues and alumni from the Journalism Department at Boston University. (It will appear in a slightly different form in my forthcoming book The Journalist’s Companion.) A JOURNALIST’S GUIDE TO S ..read more

By Christopher B. Daly Journalists face an unprecedented array of threats: the traditional physical dangers of covering riots and fires; the new online threats posed by trolls; partisan attacks on coverage someone doesn’t like; electronic hacking of our phones, laptops, and other gear. At Boston University, where I teach journalism, my colleagues and I are trying to develop materials to help our students “Stay Safe” while they are on assignment — reporting, shooting videos, taking photos, recording audio, or whatever. This was prompted by the horrors of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing (which ..read more

Strike a blow for freedom! Fight against fake news! By Christopher B. Daly In these challenging times for the news business, it is more important than ever for Americans who care about press freedom and about real news to take concrete steps to strengthen the institutions of the free press. At present, journalism is under attack. A president-elect actively denounces the press. The conservative movement denigrates the “mainstream media” and coaches its supporters to despise and distrust it. People of bad faith pollute the news stream with “fake news,” seeking profits or political advantag ..read more

By Christopher B. Daly Two important trend lines have recently crossed, probably forever. The number of jobs in the U.S. newspaper sector has now dipped below the number of jobs in the digital media. Newspapers are not dead, but they are no longer the center of gravity for the news business. Thus ends a dominance that began in the 17th century and reached a peak in the 20th century before cratering in the 21st century. That is one of the major findings in a new study from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, documenting what many have long noticed: American newspapers are no longer the driving ..read more

by Christopher B. Daly Plenty. The little-known artist Alfred Waud was one of the most important “visual journalists” covering the greatest conflict in American history. Along with the young Winslow Homer and Thomas Nast, Waud was assigned to cover the fighting, including the critical Battle of Gettysburg, by drawing sketches that could quickly be converted into engravings that could be printed along with text in the pages of newspapers like Harper’s Weekly. Much better known are the photographs of Mathew Brady (and his less-well-known team of assistants). But Brady’s photos, for all their pow ..read more

By Christopher B. Daly Do we get too much information about distant conflicts, or too little? The New York Times offers two very different answers. One comes from Anjan Sundaram, a former stringer for The Associated Press in Congo. So, he should know. He laments the withdrawal of American correspondents from many countries, the shuttering of overseas bureaus, and a general decline in the coverage of wars, violence, and the politics of many nations. News organizations need to work more closely with stringers. Make no mistake: Life as a stringer, even for those eager to report from abroad, is d ..read more

By Christopher B. Daly The remarkable Tyler Hicks seems to have a knack for being present where things happen. Hicks, the NYTimes photojournalist who won a Pulitzer Prize for breaking news this year for his 2013 photos of a mass shooting at a mall in Kenya, just happened to be nearby Wednesday when news broke again. He was staying at a seaside hotel in Gaza when an Israeli rocket struck the beach, killing four young cousins. In an unusual move, the Times posted a first-person piece by Hicks, in which he described his work. Here’s an excerpt: I had returned to my small seaside hotel aroun ..read more

By Christopher B. Daly On this historic occasion, here’s an array of historic media images from D-Day and the following couple of momentous days as the Allies fought their way off the beaches and began the horrible “hedgerow campaign.” –Robert Capa’s iconic photos for LIFE magazine can be seen at this memorial page maintained by Magnum (the photo agency Capa helped to found.) These are the highest quality I have found yet. D-Day invasion photo by Robert Capa –Recently discovered are these rare color moving images made by Hollywood film director George Stevens while he was volunteering t ..read more

By Christopher B. Daly  A hat-tip to journalist and educator Ted Gup for a terrific story about his discovery of a classic work of journalism history — the copy of How the Other Half Lives that was owned and annotated by the author himself, Jacob Riis. As I described him in my book, Covering America, Riis (pronounced rees) was a Danish immigrant to New York City who was shocked and outraged by the conditions he found in the city’s many tenements in the late 19th century. Picking up his notebook and a camera (equipped with a then-new technology — the portable flash), he explored the warren ..read more