Good pictures needed for revolutionary journalism

The Militant counts on its readers and worker correspondents to contribute to making it a lively and accurate working-class newspaper.

High quality photos can truly be worth 1,000 words. When sending in an article, it is always good to think about what kind of picture would help illustrate it.

Here are a few suggested guidelines:

Make sure they are in focus. This may seem elementary, but it takes practice.

Take photos from a variety of angles and choose several of the best ones to send in.

For demonstrations, a large crowd shot can be useful, but usually a better news photo is one that gets in closer and shows signs, banners, and expressions on people’s faces and shows some action.

If you take close-up shots of individuals, ask the person for their name and how it is spelled.

Besides photos of demonstrations, protests, picket lines, strikes, and political events, the Militant is always looking for shots that show distribution of the paper and Pathfinder books.

Digital photographs must be of high enough resolution for print quality, so set your camera to a high-resolution setting, if possible for 300 DPI. The preferred file format is JPG. A quality JPG file will be at least one megabyte in size or 1,000 pixels wide.

We encourage you to use whenever possible a high quality digital camera. This is preferred over a cell phone. While some of the most current cell phones cameras are getting better, our experience is that a good-quality digital camera still gives us a noticeable and significantly higher quality photo. And that helps make the Militant more attractive and draws readers in.

Send us the original, un-manipulated photo, not a “compacted” or reduced size one.

Make sure you send in all the necessary information. This includes: date and location, a brief caption saying what the photo shows, and names of individuals in the photo. Also specify who the photo should be credited to, for example: Militant/Jane Doe.

Send your photo by email to themilitant@mac.com or submit it using the form on this page.