Beyond The Darkroom p. 36

By: ROBERT J. SALGADO

IT WAS ONCE conventional wisdom among journalists that the way into management was through the copy desk, and the ability to write a good headline fast was the touchstone. Now, photographers have discovered that they, too, can run the newsrooms they used to just visit.
In fact, Ralph Langer, who started out as a news photographer and rose to executive editor of the Dallas Morning News, believes visual skills are as important to a news executive these days as word skills.
"You either have to have them, or you have to hire someone who has them and make them important in your organization," he said in an interview.
In one indication of the importance of photo managers, the Associated Press recently annointed executive photo editor Vin Alabiso with the additional title of vice president, making him the first photo exec the news agency ever named vice president. Since returning to AP in 1990 from the Boston Globe, where he was director of photography, Alabiso's photo staff has nabbed a Pulitzer Prize every year except one.
Carolyn Lee, assistant managing editor of the New York Times, is one of those someones. She is not a photographer. But as a page designer and photo editor, she has fought the battle for strong, meaningful pictures almost from the start of her career. Now she has a place on the masthead and power over words, as well as pictures.
Ironically, the "Gray Lady of 43rd Street," as the Times is sometimes called, was also where Gary Haynes, recently retired assistant managing editor/graphics of the Philadelphia Inquirer, developed his much copied approach to the managing of a newspaper photo department, an approach that puts pictures on equal footing with words.
Haynes worked as a photographer and photo manager for United Press International before joining the Times in 1969 as national photo editor. There he worked with Gene Roberts, then national editor, on what Haynes remembers as, "Assignment America, a story a day that rarely used more than two pictures," Haynes said. For this, he could call on 18 photographers around the country.
Five years later, Roberts, who was named executive editor of the Inquirer in 1972, lured Haynes to Philadelphia, from his post as photo editor of the San Francisco Examiner, with the promise of complete autonomy.
Autonomy meant the photo staff "controlled assignments, editing, sizing, scaling and play" of pictures, Haynes recalled in an interview at his Philadelphia town house.
Because of his special relationship with Roberts, after all the editors had pitched their stories at the daily editorial meeting and left, Haynes stayed behind to suggest what pictures should be used and how, he said.
At the Inquirer, Haynes abolished the concept of photo as a service department whose photographers could be assigned to take pictures for the advertising department just as easily as for the news or feature departments. And he brought photo editors into the same room with the photographers.
But Haynes never wanted to move further up in management.
"Being assistant managing editor was as far from photography as I wanted to get," he explained.
Many young photojournalists today reject such limited ambitions. Mike Smith, one of the photo editors Haynes trained at the Inquirer, is now director of photography at the Detroit Free Press.
"I've always thought of myself more as a journalist than just a photographer," he said.
Smith, who took pictures at the Dallas Morning News for three years before moving to the Inquirer in 1983, said Haynes "ran a good show. It was a good place to learn to be a photo editor."
At the Free Press, Smith produced entire sections, including selecting stories and pictures, overseeing their display, and assuring adequate news hole ? in other words, managing words as well as pictures.
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San Jose Mercury News managing editor David Yarnold, another one of just a few former photographers who is running an entire news operation, sees no reason others can't do what he did.
"Leadership skills don't necessarily belong to people that practice a particular craft," he ex-plained, admitting that few photographers rise to top newsroom jobs.
He started in newspapers taking pictures for the Long View Daily News in Washington and then spent a year as an Associated Press photographer. His career as a picture editor took him to the Louisville Courier-Journal and in 1981 to San Jose, where he became, in his words, "the paper's first picture editor."
Yarnold's move from assistant managing editor of graphics to managing editor required a couple of years of cross training on the paper's copy, city and news desks, plus stints as executive news editor a.m., assistant managing editor p.m., and deputy managing editor.
As managing editor, he said, "You don't have to do everything better than anyone else, but you have to know enough to manage others effectively."
Still, he observed, the odds are stacked against photographers: They are badly outnumbered by other journalists with similar ambitions.
They also frequently get sidetracked by technology, which engulfs photographers in ways reporters couldn't grasp, most recently in the shift to digital imaging.
"If you decide to be a systems editor, you're not going to be a managing editor," Yarnold explained.
Langer, the Morning News executive editor, said his experience as a photographer was limited to early in his career, mostly on small newspapers where he also functioned as a reporter. He has not worked as a newspaper photographer since taking a desk job at the Free Press, although he still does a lot of photography on his own time.
Langer, who describes himself as "a word person who has visual sensibilities," worked as managing editor of the Dayton, Ohio, Journal Herald and editor of the Everett, Wash., Herald before going to Dallas in 1981 as managing editor and moving to the exec spot two years later.
Langer, who overhauled photo operations at the Morning News, says photographers should be involved from the beginning of the reporting process, including the planning that precedes news gathering ? instead of being brought in at the end.
Carolyn Lee of the New York Times agrees that photography has to be a part of news gathering, not just illustration for it.
Sometimes photographers lack the ability to describe their pictures and need an editor's help, she said, adding, "Word people are driven nuts when you say a picture should be used because it's a wonderful picture."
Lee, who sees herself as a photographer's ally, says she succeeds as the head of the photo department because of her "feeling for pictures" and because the photographers "could talk to me."
She joined the Times in 1978 as a copy editor after designing pages at the Loiusville Courier-Journal and before that at the Houston Post. At the Times, she moved to assistant national editor, photo editor and now assistant managing editor and part of a four-person Page One team.
At least one photographer has moved all the way to publisher ? no family strings attached.
William Brown was publisher of the Royal Oak, Mich., Daily Tribune from 1982 to 1984 and of a weekly group in suburban Philadelphia.
He then put his publishing skills to work for the union: converting a strike paper in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., the Citizens' Voice, into a for-profit enterprise in which the employees own stock.
Now, he is putting the same skills to work on the strike paper in Detroit, where the Guild is involved in a bitter strike against the Free Press and Detroit News.
Brown started out as a photographer in Philadelphia for International News Photo in 1949 fresh out of high school, but was soon laid off to make way for returning veterans, he recalled. The Philadelphia Inquirer made him a photographer in 1962. He became active in the Guild, and was elected president of the local. While representing workers at other newspapers, he got to know Ralph Ingersoll II, who was working at one of his father's newspapers.
Years later, after Brown had become an international Guild representative and after the Wilkes-Barre strike, Ingersoll called and "made me an offer I couldn't refuse ? a lot of money," Brown recalled. He jumped at the chance to run Ingersoll's weeklies.
"You have to know about financial stuff," he said of his experience managing for a chain. "You see the problems management has."
In seminars he gives for Guild organizers, he says, "Don't think being a publisher is all Cadillacs and country clubs."
His publishing skills have been invaluable to the strikers in Detroit where he rented a building, bought Macs, QuarkXPress and arranged for the printing of 300,000 copies of the Detroit Sunday Journal at two printing plants in Michigan.