NPR’s Next Gen Radio provides training for college students and early career journalists through intensive audio-focused digital journalism workshops. For Next Gen Radio’s 2017 project in Seattle, I served as the program’s first photo editor.

After presenting students with my tried-and-true photojournalism training session, which I developed over several years spent teaching reporters how to make better photographs (at St. Louis Public Radio and through workshops for the Public Media Journalists Association) I worked one-on-one with each student to talk through the photo possibilities for their stories.

Although Next Gen is an audio-focused project, the director asked me to come on board to make sure participants received photo training. I developed a system for organizing all visual assets and an overall photo workflow for the project to ensure reporters and editors were thinking about visuals from day one.

One challenge I faced was that most students were doing their reporting on the same days — the first couple of days of the workshop. Ideally, I would’ve loved to go out with each student to provide hands-on coaching in the field.

Although that wasn’t possible since their reporting days overlapped, I sat with each student back in the newsroom and went through every one of their photos with them. We discussed what made some photos stronger than others and I took note of which photos they personally liked best, giving constructive feedback and encouragement. I made selections, explaining my reasoning so they could learn about photo editing. Later on, I made final selections, toned and cropped all photos and made sure we had accurate and complete caption information.