Last Updated: December 29, 2000
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Pages across
America
The world in pictures; local area in stories
By Andrea Nemitz
In a global community, what better way to acquaint readers to the neighborhood
than through pictures? This is the underlying idea behind the Portland
Press Herald’s Lenscape pages.
Photos are the windows to the newspaper. They draw our readers onto
our pages, into our pages and allow an emotional connection
to the news.
The new Lenscape photo feature came about after staff brainstorming.
Through “Lenscape,” the photo staff and news copy desk wanted to give readers
a deeper look at world and national events.
Images are chosen for their visual and news value. We look for a mix
of national and world photos, but we don’t duplicate photos that would
accompany more prominently featured news stories. (We wouldn’t have a hurricane
photo and story on Page 1 and more hurricane photos in this feature.) It
is designed to supplement the photo and news wire reports.
To date, we haven’t had much reader feedback, but the feature is relatively
new, debuting earlier this summer.
The “Maine Faces” feature is also a new initiative for the Press Herald
and Maine Sunday Telegram.
We borrowed the idea from two other New England newspapers, the Providence
Journal and the Concord Monitor.
This feature focuses on everyday people in the paper’s circulation area
and features a picture and a brief story of their lives.
The people we feature are people you might see every day and wonder,
who are they? What are their lives all about? It’s about ordinary
people in our community.
Why cover those folks? I think our photos and stories too often focus
on the same, regular players. This feature lets us take a step deeper into
the community and looks more closely at interesting people who aren’t making
news in the traditional sense, but whose interesting lives are a part of
who we are, who this community is.
Why try new things and why experiment with innovative approaches? Features
like Maine Faces are good for the readers and we’ve had a positive response
to these. But they’re also good for the photographers. Instead of rushing
from assignment to assignment, this gives them a chance to slow down, work
with a subject and come to the one image that really sums up who this person
is.
I think that reinforces one thing we try to stress here with feature
and enterprise photography: You may not get the best photo the first time
around. You may have to revisit your subject and take the time to capture
the right image. Photographers can go back, just like a reporter can go
back and revisit the subject and ask more questions. This allows them the
freedom to take the time to get the best photo.
Nemitz is the assistant managing editor of the Portland Press Herald/Maine
Sunday Telegram.
