by Nancy M. Davis

Picture this: From a seventh-floor newsroom in Washington, D.C., 20 journalists and two technicians operate The Associated Press State Photo Center. Using Macintosh computers, Photoshop and IBM RS 6000 Servers, they sort and resort files to find the graphics that best fit the day’s events, then correct the color, crop the images and clean up the captions. Working in shifts from 6 a.m. to 3 a.m., they accept, edit and transmit an average 800 images daily. On March 9, during one of their busiest months, they edited and posted 1,105 photos to editors nationwide.

A few of these images appear in nearly every U.S. daily and capture places in history. You know them intimately: Elian Gonzalez. A Richmond, Va., restaurant sign advertising Ghetto Burgers. Parents embracing their teenagers after the Santana High School shooting in Santee, Calif. Newspaper photographers, rather than AP folks, tend to document local history because they operate closer to the news, says State Photo Center Director Robert A. Daugherty.

The center was founded in 1997 following the merger of regional photo desks in the Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City and Washington bureaus. Since then, the volume of photos transmitted has grown nearly 60 percent. Thanks to members, “no one can match AP’s resources for 50-state coverage,” says Daugherty.

Click on photos to enlarge. Clockwise, from top left, a pair of Canada geese descend through early spring fog over Silver Lake in Rochester, Minn., photo by Scott Jacobson, Post-Bulletin, Rochester, Minn.; Florida Gov. Jeb Bush jokes with brother George W. Bush as the president stepped off Air Force One in Orlando March 21, photo by Joe Burbank, Orlando Sentinel; unidentified parents reunite with their children after the shooting at Santana High School in Santee, Calif., March 5,; photo by Nadia Borowski, San Diego Union-Tribune; Pittsburgh Penguins goaltender Jean-Sebastien Aubin can only watch as the puck hits the net, a goal for Minnesota Wild in St. Paul Feb. 2—Minnesota won 4-2, photo by Carlos Gonzalez, Star Tribune, Minneapolis.

Images contributed by members make up 41 percent of those transmitted from 2021 K Street N.W. It takes only 20 seconds for a file to arrive via satellite on newspapers’ photo desks from AP’s communication link in Cranbury, N.J. Only the AP desks in London, Mexico City, New York City and Tokyo produce photos that rival those from this address in their volume and impact, says Vincent J. Alabiso, AP vice president and executive photo editor, who supervises more than 400 AP staff photographers and photo editors in 121 countries worldwide.

Daugherty and Alabiso respect the quality and quantity of members’ images that pour through PhotoStream. Both have improved over the last 10 years as the AP replaced classic drum transmitters with AP Leaf Picture Desks and then, last year, with AP Servers—IBM fileservers with the Windows NT operating system. Newspaper photographers, technicians and managers have gained speed and expertise in the production and management of digital images, most prepared in Photoshop as JPEG files and sent to the AP using File Transfer Protocol.

Nearly all AP members get the whole photo report, but most editors don’t view them all. Photo editors now search by category. If editors decide to run a story on China, they ask the photo editor to find a picture to go with it.

Daugherty’s digital-image specialists greet Washington’s cherry blossoms, for instance, by transmitting a deluge of photos to members. Cherry-blossom time also marks the confluence of playoffs in several layers of school sports.

When asked during an early-spring visit, “Do newpaper editors ever want fewer photos?” Daugherty responds, “Editors want more choices.” They haven’t reached the saturation point for local or AP photos, he says. “Some have moved their deadlines closer to presstime now that a high proportion have digital cameras that permit photographers to stay in the field longer.

“Digital processing saves time and money.”

‘COOKING UP A STORM’
Daugherty’s workdays begin at 7 a.m. A little later, center editors participate in national news meetings via conference calls. The editors monitor the wire service’s online budgets, including new ones for separate wires covering South and West regions in the United States. They make sure that AP journalists or members plan pictures to go with major stories.

Robert Meyers, a photo editor, participates in the conference calls as the center’s daytime supervisor. He coordinates with AP’s national, international and state staffs. On March 19 alone, his domestic news diet offered a criminal extradition to California, a Bill Gates press conference, the naming of a bishop in Bridgeport, Conn., a potential pilots’ strike, an Iowa train derailment, Washington visits by Israeli and Japanese prime ministers, an energy conference, and a space-shuttle trip.

Meyers has a degree in journalism from the University of Georgia in Athens and several years’ experience as a photographer and photo editor in the United States and Great Britain. “Every day is different,” he says. “A lot of time, we’re ‘flipping burgers,’ cooking up a storm with pictures coming and going as quick as you can. But there’s always time to stop and admire the well-photographed picture.”

Meyers and his peers aren’t deskbound. They regularly grab laptops and hit the road to process photographers’ images on location. For instance, Meyers processed photos in the AP’s trailer during the last Super Bowl in Tampa. During some seasons, timely sports photographs make up as much as half of the center’s yield. Daugherty’s staff races the clock every evening to service deadlines as they fall East to West.

“We’re right in the thick of the news,” says Photo Editor Jody A. Kurash, who has a master’s degree in advertising, plus sportswriting and photography gigs in her background. She coordinates photos for the Southern regional wire.

Center editors confront civil unrest and personal tragedy far more than even the most seasoned editor for a single paper. In just one morning, they planned to receive photos for stories on the havoc wreaked by bad weather in Florida, the trial of a 15-year-old sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole, a Baltimore hospital strike, three confirmed cases of Legionnaire’s disease, and a pending transit strike in Philadelphia. One of the day’s few light notes was a budget item regarding the traditional return of turkey vultures to their roosts in rocky lakeside ledges near Hinckley, Ohio.

SHARING IMAGES—FREE
When a disaster occurs, a Washington supervisor coordinates with a New York supervisor to assign tasks. They ask members and bureau staff to send copy and photos when available, says Daugherty. “We try to take the emotion out of it. In a plane crash or weather disaster, we assign one photo editor to handle the report and, in a sensitive story, a second staffer checks the work before it is filed.

“We try to keep the stress factor low because it can be contagious,” he adds. “We have pizza parties during heavy filing periods and try to make this a nice place to work,” he says, gesturing to an expanse of desks that is, indeed, far tidier and quieter than most journalists’ warrens.

Daugherty says members continue to be “incredibly cooperative in sharing their copy and images with each other for free. There is a feeling among right-thinking journalists that this is a way of giving something back to the profession. Folks in our industry pay their dues in terms of helping other folks.”

To encourage member contributions, the Associated Press Managing Editors organization sponsors contests with monthly and annual awards for the best photos. APME presents its annual $1,000 prize at a yearly meeting. Soon, APME will launch a separate AP Photo Managers group, says James C. Dooley, Newsday’s director of photography and one of the contest judges. For more information, check www.apme.com. To contact Daugherty, send him an e-mail, or call (202) 776-9884.