Buzzfeed, Human Rights Watch, and Esquire. Day 4

Day 4 of our NYC trip we started off the day at Buzzfeed meeting with an RIT alum, Kate Bubucz. Buzzfeed is currently trying to increase their news coverage. They cover news from all over the world and have freelancers all over the place to shoot the story immediately. Kate works on the features section of the news which posts roughly 5 stories a week, but all of buzzfeed posts about 100+ stories a day. She encouraged us to be creative with our photographs but before we try something new, do the assignment. That way you have a safety net. She told us, like almost every other place so far, that clean writing is important. I'm glad that's being pressed into my head because I wasn't understanding of how big of a deal it was until this trip. Some tips she gave us were "no" is not an answer, be nice to people, and your photo editors are your friends. 

Then we went to Human Rights Watch where we met with Emma Daly. Human Rights Watch investigates issues from around the world and their goal is to "expose the abuses." They are a non-profit (which I have started to realize the kind of place I want to work at) and put the work out there to bring a voice to the victims and create change. She talked about the importance of being aware of yourself as an intruder when you are photographing or interviewing subjects. You don't want to re-traumatize them. Unfortunately we only had a little while to talk so we weren't able to talk about everything I wanted to talk about, however internships did come up and there seem to be a lot of great internships there. 

At Esquire we met with Michael Norseng who is the photo director there. He presented us with a slideshow of important photographers who have worked for Esquire in the past. To name a few there was Bruce Davidson, Diane Arbus, and Eugene Richards. Esquire doesn't break news so they have a lot of time to work on stories and get them right. Mike said that the most important thing for us as young photographers to do right now is to get our brand in order to show who we are and what our voice is. He said the three most important things to do is to stay true to yourself, having tenacity, and not judging our work by where we are working.