Many times people ask me what I am doing when I am not working for The Average Angler. Well outside of my world in fly fishing, I shoot for the photo agency I co-founded in 2007, Agency New Jersey, you can see that website HERE . Late Friday afternoon I received a call from the photo desk at The New York Times asking me if the agency was covering the minutes old shooting of a Lakewood New Jersey police officer. In the last year or so we haven't been chasing the hard news I once loved to shoot. We used to run around the clock and provide images to newspapers and magazines, those were the good old days. However, the industry has changed dramatically and it just doesn't pay to cover news anymore. But as soon as I heard that job I grabbed my cameras and headed down the Parkway. The entire area was locked down as police searched for the shooter. There is one thing I miss about shooting news, you always need to get THE shot. So I traveled some side streets and found my way to one of the related scenes to the shooting. Once I made this image I knew I could leave. With deadlines looming for Saturdays paper I had to transmit this to New York.
As much as I love The New York Times, their picture use and style, not always their politics, it killed me and the agency when they stopped covering New Jersey and having the New Jersey section, then the Metro section, and now the hardly-New Jersey-covered NY/Region section. What would have been a huge six column above the fold picture and story, now gets buried in the National section of the Saturday paper. I went out again yesterday, Saturday morning, to get more as the manhunt continues for the shooter. I made some more images and transmitted them to the photo desk at the Times. In the end they updated the website, and ran a short in Sunday's paper in the National section.
