Last week, Stephanie Clifford wrote an article in the New York Times detailing changes in the landscape of professional photography arising from the competition with amateurs newly-enfranchised by digital technology.

For the past three months, I have been working on major projects as a special advisor to the School of Communication at American University here in Washington D.C. and as journalist-in-residence for the Knight Center for International Media within the School of Communication at the University of Miami.

At the recent Joop Swart Masterclass for World Press Photo, I was touched by the desire of Iranian photographer Ali Akbar Shirjian, a student, to bring back information from the class to his fellow Iranian photographers in the hopes he could use the fruits of his experience to help them to organize effectively into a professional group.

Over a eight-day span recently, I worked as a part of the team teaching at the Joop Swart Masterclass, sponsored by the World Press Photo organization in Amsterdam.

Joining me in that endeavor were photographers Philip Blenkinsop, Giorgia Fiorio, and Maggie Steber, photo curator Celina Lunsford, and photo book publisher Dewi Lewis.

I just returned from a three and a half-day stint as a multimedia story coach at the Fall Workshop sponsored by Syracuse University for more than 50 undergraduate and graduate students in the Multimedia, Photography, and Design (MPD) departments of the Newhouse School. This year, the students documented life in the nearby town of Skaneateles, New York, recording audio, writing short stories, and shooting photos and video.

I am a big fan of the use of direct field observations to help stimulate new product innovations; a technique embraced by firms such as Ideo.

To that end, I have recently been watching my college-bound daughter and her friends interact as they all experience the beginning of their freshman year. Their media choices and media consumption patterns are particularly relevant to me as they are harbingers of a future that will be shaped by the habits of the first generation of “digital natives.”

As I regroup after several weeks of personal and professional travel, I wanted to address an interesting question that was raised recently as I was doing a live discussion on video journalism for knowledgewebb.net.

Today, I wanted to acknowledge my multimedia colleagues at MSNBC.com marking the first decade of “The Week in Pictures”, or TWIP as it is known in the trade. MSNBC.com senior multimedia editor Meredith Birkett has put together a good behind-the-scenes look that details both the history and ambition of this presentation – a mainstay feature of their visual journalism presentation.