Photojournalism - Now You Get It

When reading or listening to the news at more or less any given time, and realizing the world is basically as horrid as ever, still the events of the world can seem a bit intangible through text only. What one reads is left, not necessarily vague, since the things described in a context of, say, a war, are usually extremely graphic, but the effect is nevertheless distant. Something terrible happening over there, more injustices going around here...take Ukraine, Syria or the forever ongoing bashing of Palestine as current examples. But to someone who can't even begin to understand those kinds of environments, the intended message of a textual item is not received. Not really.

And that's when I have great respect for photojournalist, who are able to translate the human experience of these inhuman conditions to the recipient and convey something by far emotionally stronger than just reading a description of happenings in a magazine or events in a newspaper. Being in the middle of revising for my next exam and looking to relax for a while, I checked what kind of photo journalistic sites I could find for this week's post in The Media Hawk.

Here's a couple that feature beautiful and effective photographic stories of the word on versatile topics:

FOTO8

Great Photojournalism

Evaluate and Improve - Guide to Communication Metrics (Juholin 2010)

Elisa Juholin has written a timely book on how to measure and improve communication within a corporate and business environment. I will now jot down a couple of thoughts that reading this book evoked in me to summarize the main points of it.

The first interesting point that Evaluate and Improve - Guide to Communication Metrics (Arvioi ja paranna! Viestinnän mittaamisen opas, 2010)  starts off with is how the landscape of communications has changed from the process like thinking of (uninterrupted) information flows to the 2.0 digital nation, where we create meaning for ourselves through participation and share information freely. In today's working environment concerning communications it is important to try to combine the need for the effectiveness and accountability of communication with the new shades of self-expression and sociability.

To conduct a basic assessment of communications is common sense: start by evaluating your input -  are we doing the right things with the resources we have?, consider your output - did we manage to do what we set out to do (numerical targets)?, how about the outcome of communicating -  did our communication achieve the desired impact (qualitative targets)? and finally the outflow - what are the (long-term) effects of our communications? Depending on context, there is a different answer to these questions.

Whilst Juholin places a lot of emphasis on making communications an area to be taken seriously by setting up metrics which are measurable in money. I liked her idea of moving from ROI (return on investment) to ROC (return on communication, because some of communications' impact is immaterial and hard to define in value. Take reputation, for example. KPIs (key performance indicators) are many, again depending on context, and they
can variate from the number of clicks or increase in sales when launching an advertising campaign in social media to the number of job applicants to a company or increase/decrease in work satisfaction after a change in an organization, to name a few. The problem with setting up these metrics is, of course, the fact that there are factors other than communications activities playing a part in the formation of them. Despite an awesome presence in the media, an initiative can fail miserably due to large scale economic factors or other "force major" external circumstances.

Besides giving the reader concrete tools for evaluating and improving communications activities and process as well as for formulating communications metrics and collecting information from an organization or a "field", Juholin makes a good point regarding (communications) trainings that companies organize and the feedback that they collect from them; is the immediate feedback concerning the quality of the training/trainer really what we're looking for or should we really be asking what kind of an impact the earning has had in the environment the person functions? I think this is the kind of "long sight" we need to know that what we do at work actually is worth while.
 
In any case, whether working in a commercial advertising environment, civil association of some description or in a corporate organization, Juholin's Evaluate and Improve! is a good read for doing and improving things in practice. A far cry from the conceptual bullshit of the world of academia, which normally has nothing to do with the real life.

Back on the horse with Jonathan Hobin

It's been long enough since my last blog post and it's time to get back on the horse now. The end of 2014 was mostly consumed by completing assignments for my university courses and unfortunately that didn't allow any time for blogging. That and the "small" matter of my daughter... The new year has started rather good with the course grades all coming in at 4 (on the scale of 1 to 5) for which I'm really pleased as I can give myself credit for doing everything that I set my mind to, and doing it well, whilst looking after and raising a small child. Well done me, even if I say so myself!

One of my favourite freebie publications in Helsinki is without a doubt Six Degrees magazine. It never fails to entertain and I always read the column of David Brown, which always has poignant points about our culture in the eyes of an originally non-native.

What caught my eye in the January's edition of Six Degrees though, was the interview with Photographer Jonathan Hobin, whose exhibition "In The Playroom" has just closed at the Finnish Photography Museum. Gutted! Absolutely gutted that I didn't make it there on time, as this is the kind of photography that inspires me.

In his interview Jonathan Hobin explains that it is his way of exploring our society and attempting to show what the kids of current times learn from it through the act of play. His topics deal mainly with violence in its different forms and the different narratives surrounding that. Like the good cop-bad cop set up witnessed widely in our cultural texts, for example. Jonathan says that when staging his settings the kids get it straight away: "You want me to kill that person? No problem". So you see, the concept is familiar from very early on.

Jonathan encounters a lot of critique towards his work when people question his motives to go into the last sanctuary of innocence, the childhood, but he hopes for a proper discussion on what our "problem" is and finding out if there's something we can do about it. Well, I think that it's an topic that should definitely be looked at and one that I will get in touch with through following my child learning the rules of play of our society in the years to come. And should I ever have a second chance of checking out Jonathan Hobin's work, I will most certainly use it!