MPPA News

MPPA’s online forum is back up, with a whole new look. Head over and join (or start) the discussion.

The final results of the MPPA’s 2007 Member Clip Contest are in.

Students: If you couldn’t make it to this year’s contest judging, you can still listen to the judges’ comments on College Photographer of the Year portfolios.

Robert Hendricks, photo adviser at The State News, has made audio clips available on his website.

Detroit Free Press photographer Rashaun Rucker was named Photographer of the Year by the Michigan Press Photographers Association March 2 at its 55th annual Pictures of the Year contest. Rucker, 29, is the first African American to win the award, which celebrates a year’s worth of exemplary visual storytelling.

“I almost cried,” Rucker said. “Even though I won, this is recognition for all the people at the Free Press who helped me throughout the year.” Rucker’s body of work in 2007 included a months-long project documenting the care, abuse and impact of pit bulls in metro Detroit, the release of Nathaniel Abraham from prison, and a photo-video package on feather bowling.

Jeana-Dee Allen of Flint, a student at Michigan State University, was named the College Photographer of the Year for the second straight year.

Steve Jessmore, formerly of the Flint Journal, won the prestigious Barry Edmonds Michigan Understanding Award for his photo column, “Sense of Community.” Jessmore is now the Photo Editor at the Sun-News in Myrtle Beach, SC.

Ryan Wood of the Midland Daily News was named Photo Editor of the Year, also for the second straight year.

The contest was judged by: David Stephenson, photojournalist at the Lexington Herald Leader, Sue Morrow, deputy director of photography at the Sacramento Bee and Chad Stevens, a multimedia specialist at MediaStorm. The contest drew 1,554 total entries from more than 20 newspapers around the state of Michigan in 22 photography, editing and multimedia categories. 105 people entered the annual contest.

All of the winning images and pages are available here.

Well, as of late last night, mppa.org has a whole new look. The structure of the site is essentially the same, with a few minor tweaks. You’ll notice that the main section headers in the left sidebar expand to display their subsections when clicked.

For the moment, much of the older content has yet to be migrated into the new system (past POY and clip results, portfolios). I’ll be working on this over time, but the idea was to get the new site up in time for this year’s contest. In the meantime, if there’s something specific you’re looking for, the old site is still online. Find it at mppa.org/old.

The News section is what appears on the front page. I hope this will become more dynamic in the future, so please don’t hesitate to submit news items that you’d like to share with fellow MPPA members. You can share projects you’re working on, job changes … really anything of note.

I’d like to start posting winning images from the Clip Contest along with results. So … if you’re a winner, please send me a jpg file of your image, sized to 800 pixels on the long end and with the caption embedded in the file info.

Any section that displays the RSS icon is available as an RSS feed. So, in response to overwhelming popular demand, you can now read MPPA news and contest results on your iPhone. New to RSS? Download a free feed reader (like NetNewsWire on OS X, FeedDemon on Windows, or a web-based service like Google Reader) and start getting your news the geeky way.

The forum is not quite operational yet, but it will be soon. It runs on a different system now, so you’ll need to register again.

And remember, all MPPA members are entitled to a portfolio on this site. To take advantage of this space, follow these directions.

And finally, links. The links page is intact, but in need of a breath of life. Submit current links to keep MPPA colleagues apprised of what’s hot on the Net.

Good. Feedback/comments/questions are very welcome. This is still a work in progress, and I’d be happy to hear of anything you’d like to see on the site in the future.

Enjoy,
— Patrick