By Maya Trent · Originally reported by Richard Horgan (2012) · Wayback archive →
In April 2012, San Francisco State University professor Ken Kobré released Deadline Every Second, a documentary about twelve Associated Press photojournalists — including SoCal staffer Chris Carlson — capturing news from national and international hot spots.
Then
Kobré had been a longtime photojournalism educator and had authored Photojournalism: The Professionals’ Approach. The documentary’s broader cast included photographers covering Arab Spring uprisings, U.S. presidential campaigns, and the daily wire-photo grind. Chris Carlson, the SoCal AP staffer profiled, had been covering everything from Oscars red carpets to natural-disaster aftermath.
Now
The AP wire-photo infrastructure has gone through substantial transformation. The 2010s saw the broader collapse of staff-photographer positions at U.S. newspapers — the Chicago Sun-Times’ notorious 2013 layoff of its entire photography staff was one example. The documentary remains in use across journalism programs as an artifact of the last era when the wire-photo staff-photographer model was still operating at the scale the film captured.
More from the FishbowlLA archive
- LAPD Chief Charlie Beck’s 2011 critique of LA media gang-coverage — the shallow-coverage thesis
- Anita Busch confronts Anthony Pellicano at his December 2008 sentencing — the wiretapping case in court
- California Watch’s April 2011 ‘On Shaky Ground’ investigation — seismic-safety failure in California public schools