• Disappearing Photographs

    Brian McDermott
    May 26, 2011

    Several years ago, I dressed up as a 1940s-era photojournalist for Halloween. I wore a fedora with a PRESS card, a fake mustache and a cheap suit while carrying around an antique twin-lens camera and an unlit cigar.

    When I saw my friends, they said, “Oh, you’re a journalist.” Strangers said, “Look, a photographer.” But no one registered that I was an anachronism: a vintage photojournalist. To this assortment of Wonder Women, zombies and cowboys, nothing had changed since those fast-talking, flashbulb days.

  • Teaching Journalism in the Digital Age

    Brian McDermott
    April 15, 2010

    On January 27, 2010, the day Steve Jobs announced that the brand new iPad would not work with Flash, I was preparing to teach the second week of "Web Design for Journalists" at University of Massachusetts-Amherst. The class, too, was brand new. The topic was building cutting edge motion graphics to enhance our reporting. And we were going to use…Flash.

    The salt-flats speed of technology haunts the syllabi of new media journalism professors. Yet for all the time new technologies gobble up, the primary challenge for journalism schools in 2010 is a more basic question of identity: What should a journalism program teach in the digital world?