The March 1 deadline for applications came and went.
For 18 years, the Stan Kalish Picture Editing Workshop has focused on teaching visual storytelling, training more than 600 picture editors, designers, assignment editors, word editors and multimedia producers. It targets mid-career professionals who have aspirations, but need inspiration. It usually generates a long waiting list of applicants.
Last year, it had just 12 applications. It takes 26 to break even. At the end of May only 22 had registered and the workshop was just 10 days away.
Two weeks later, a diverse group of 28 learners hugged and said tearful goodbyes at Ball State University, as the 2007 Kalish ended. Twenty-seven rated the workshop as excellent on the exit evaluations.
Today, there is an exciting new Kalish/Poynter collaboration to announce and the June 2008 workshop at Ball State University is in the process of reinventing itself. We even changed our name to simply, “The Kalish.”
So how did all that happen?
We had to solve the immediate problem of filling the 2007 workshop. A well-oiled machine we were not. But we did ask professional organizations to help by blasting e-mails to their member lists. We called past Kampers and asked them to lean on their friends. We called universities and other organizations with a history of supporting The Kalish. We salted message boards and forums with glowing Kalish testimonials. Five days before the workshop began we took our last application.
At the same time we were recruiting the best faculty in the country. Three of 11 faculty members were involved in the editing of stories that were Pulitzer Prize winners or finalists for work done in 2006. We brought in some of the leading multimedia minds in the country.
On the workshop’s first night, the evening exercise ran 45 minutes longer than scheduled because the discussions between faculty and students were so intense. Then the workshop accelerated to the end.
We did two other things: We asked the workshop faculty to stay for an additional two days to talk about The Kalish’s future, and we asked two faculty members from past years to interview industry experts, travel to Ball State and share what they learned with the workshop faculty.
The reports from Patty Reksten, of
The Oregonian, and Bart Rayniak, of
The(Spokane, Wash.)Spokesman-Review, set the frame for two days of conversations. The group of 14 banged away at issues ranging from citizen journalism to the dilemmas caused by the industry’s headlong rush to video. Each conversation ended with a vigorous discussion of how The Kalish could best equip visual editors for those challenges.
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Randy Cox/Kalish Workshop
Bryan Moss of LIFEINCORYDON.com teaching Decide and Defend.
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The Kalish advisory group’s annual meeting to discuss curriculum changes just couldn’t keep the workshop as current as it needed to be in such a fast-changing environment. The Kalish needed to be plugged in on a year-round basis.
At the same time, Kenny Irby, visual group leader at The Poynter Institute, and a frequent Kalish faculty member, saw the potential of a Kalish-Poynter collaboration. He described a summit of publishers, managing editors, directors of photography and others, to talk about setting standards, maintaining values and strong ethical decision making, for documentary journalism in a new age. He wanted The Kalish to be a partner. That is a high honor.
He was also offering a wealth of educational resources that could greatly extend the value and reach of The Kalish.
During the discussions spurred by the reports from industry experts, we ran into conflict over values concerning still photography and video, community journalism and citizen journalists, and a host of other issues — not unlike what many newsrooms are dealing with every day.
But the Poynter proposal, with all the good things it offered, sent the advisory group into a tailspin. Why? Because the reinvention/collaboration we were contemplating went beyond a professional value to a deeply held emotional attachment. Sound familiar?
To understand The Kalish you must understand its independent spirit. With the support of the National Press Photographers Foundation, it has been remarkably successful for 18 years without help or influence from anyone. We are very proud of that. But we’re not stupid either.
We consulted our mentors and workshop founders, John and Lois Ahlhauser. They basically said that we could not expect the same four or five people to get together once a year and come up with many fresh ideas for the workshop. John and Lois supported the collaboration and in the end the Kalish advisory group voted unanimously to partner with Poynter in March 2008.
You never know where your best work will be done. Maybe our best work will be in sharing what we learned.
