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.

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.

My past two summer workshop projects have involved efforts to create multimedia stories using a mix of still photography and audio in one case and video in the other. Each was seeking to address broad, big themes by finding individual situations or characters as subjects who could then provide a way into the story.

Participants grappled with the challenge of transforming big themes into multimedia stories that could be appreciated and assimilated by the audience. In that effort, I saw interesting patterns emerge as the challenges needing to be met by the students.

Yesterday, I was conducting a live chat on behalf of knowledgewebb.net on visual journalism topics when I got this question from a student.  “Should I continue to take courses in photojournalism or switch my major now?”   The follow up question was something to the effect with all that is going on now economically “… [...]