I am thankful that Photoville offered me a chance to know how to be a professional narrative photography journalist. On Sep 27, I attended “Visual Narrative and Your Story” online meeting. Lauren Steel and Shannon Simon were teaching useful tips for being a professional photograph journalist, such as to recommend your works to the editor for a better chance to publish. Beginner journalists interested in publishing their works in magazines have to contact editors beforehand. Many of them only email pictures with additional description to editors while there are hundreds of pictures waiting. Editors obviously have no time to email you back if your work is not special enough. Thus, introduce your work with points to attract their attention, like punchy captions, accurate subjects, and detailed research about the magazine you email.
Lauren Steel is an editor who works for The New York Times. She also freelances for The New York Times Magazine. She has worked on preparation of photographs published in newspapers and magazines for ten years. She brought two important question to all of us which were what the theme of your work is and what is the point that people could find in your work. These two questions would extend a couple of other questions: are you passionate about your work and why do you think shot this is important. Lauren suggests us to think about all sides of the story and completely explain them before sending it to editor. This goes for exhibitions as well.
Here are three details she explained in the meeting:
1. Caption: To explain to viewers but it depends on your work if you prefer not to make a title. The caption is usually one or two sentences at least.
2. Research: Once you chose a subject to shoot, researching the background and peripheral information is necessary. Sometimes, a subject might take a year or longer.
3. The type of magazine: Not every magazine accepts journalism photographs. For instance, fashion magazines are not interested in journalistic photographs. Choosing a proper type of magazine before contacting the editor is important. You also need to know the rule of the magazine which you decide to work with very well. For example, if the food magazine only publishes one theme picture in the first inner page, but you were making six more pictures, the editor would not make yours the first choice.
If you don’t know any editors but would like to publish your work, you can look for agencies, scan AP, check social media or research newspaper editors online. The most convenient way is using LinkedIn, a personal website, or an online portfolio to save particular works in.
I had learned a lot in this exhibition meeting, which helps photo journalists open the door to begin the first step of publishing.
Here are some pictures shown in the meeting by Zoom. 
