VisualEditors.com marks five years of service to visual journalists
Five years ago today the call went out to visual journalists far and wide: Come join up. Let’s pool our resources and see what we can do together.
We thought we’d celebrate with a little trip down memory lane.
Robb Montgomery, founder of VizEds.
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Drift with us, please, back to the winter of 2004…
The Society for News Design had been around since the 1970s. Its annual workshops, quickcourses and Design, Update and award annual publications were musts for anyone wanting to keep up with industry happenings.
NewsPageDesigner had been up and running for a few years. It changed everything by giving us a place to see great work without having to wait for the next contest cycle to roll around. Folks enjoyed reading and posting comments to individual pages.
And the anonymous NewsDesigner blogger had started covering industry happenings. You had to check in every day or so to see who had changed jobs or who was redesigning.
But that was it. There was no LinkedIn, no FaceBook, no SND/Update blog, no regional ning sites. And there was to Twitter.
Does anyone remember how we communicated back then? I don’t.
Suddenly, out of the blue chilly air of the Chicago ‘burbs, Robb Montgomery created a bulletin board just for visual journalists.
Talk about the right thing at the right time. VizEds became a place for vocational education. A forum for innovative new ideas.
And, yes, a place to waste incredible amounts of time.
How it all came about:
MARCH 6, 2004
Robb Montomery — a page one designer for the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Red Streak — raises his staff over the internet sea and causes the ones to separate from the zeroes, creating a new web site: VisualEditors.com.
Robb creates the bulletin board as “KidVibe,” a name he uses for his self-published music CDs.
‘KidVibe’, as he was pictured at the time on his web site.
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MARCH 7, 2004
Robb registers the domain name VisualEditors.com.
He also logs on at his work address, officially giving VizEds two members. The bad news: They’re both the same person.
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MARCH 8, 2004
Robb invites his pal Steve Cavendish of the St. Petersburg Times to check out his new web site. C-Dish logs in, giving VisualEditors.com two actual members.
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MARCH 9, 2004
Robb’s new project is finally ready to officially open its doors. Robb invites folks to check it out.
I’m quick to sign up for a membership. Delighted to have a great resource like VizEds and giddy with the possiblities, I spam everyone in my address book. Robb and Steve were already doing the same.
Sixteen other members join that first day, including:
- Mark Friesen of the Portland Oregonian — no one knows it yet, but Mark is the mysterious NewsDesigner blogger. Mark gives VizEds a huge boost by blogging about it that day.
- Teresa Kriegsman and Mims Rowe of the Raleigh, N.C., News & Observer.
- John Telford and Reagan Branham of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
- Clif Page of the Beaver County (Pa.) Times.
- Bill Gaspard of the Los Angeles Times.
- Dennis Brack and Chris Kirkman of the Washington Post.
- Jeff Glick of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.
- Scott Stoddard of the Greenville (S.C.) News.
- Ken Hawkins and “haruspica23” of the Beaufort (S.C.) Gazette
- “arienne” of the Nashville Tennessean
- “hfarrant” of Panama City, Fla.
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MARCH 10, 2004
More folks discover the new web site. After gathering a total of 20 names through the end of its first real day of business, VizEds collects another 18 users on its second day.
Four big-time visual journalism bloggers join on Day Two:
1. The mysterious NewsDesigner blogger — who, as none of us knew yet, had actually signed up under his real name the day before.
2. Rich Boudet, who would later become the fabulous SportsDesigner blogger
3. Nicole Stockdale, the author of the A Capital Idea copy-editing blog.
4. Tom Mangan, originator of the famous Prints the Chaff blog
Among others signing up on March 10:
- Emmet Smith of the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
- Michael Whitley of the L.A. Times.
- Tim Ball of the Wisconsin State Journal of Madison.
- Jim McBee of the Fayetteville (N.C.) Observer.
- Andrew Reese of the Dallas Morning News.
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MARCH 13, 2004The new VisualEditors.com website reaches its first major milestone when Michelle Venezuela — the features editor at the Fayetteville Observer and known as “shellyval” — becomes VizEds‘ 50th member on its fifth day of existence.
It takes VizEds 17 days to sign up the first 100 members. The 200th member signs up on Day 67.
But then enrollment picks up again, as word-of-mouth spreads. The third century mark takes only 22 days after the second. The fourth, 15 days. The fifth, 20 days.
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JUNE 23, 2004One of the most popular features of VizEds is the chatroom. Members gather there after editions or on dinner breaks or on days off to discuss work, hobbies or just to grumble about their bosses.
On this date, the chatroom registers its all-time peak, when 31 users are logged in simultaneously.
It’s pandemonium. But in a good way.
The VizEds home page, as it appeared in the summer of 2004.
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OCT. 2, 2004Vizeds holds its first in-person gathering — a party at Pizz’a Chicago, a block or so away from the Fairmont Hotel, where SND/San Jose is going on. The party is organized by Matt Erickson of the Times of Northwest Indiana.
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OCT. 17, 2004Recognizing what most VizEds users are calling the site, Robb registers the domain VizEds.com.
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FEB. 3, 2005Charles Gooch of the Kansas City Star posts a question in the VizEds forums — “Who’s your favorite new designer?” — kicking off a series of top-10 lists and related posts that becomes one of VizEds‘ first site-wide memes. Hilarity ensues.
Later that month, VizEds users donate more than $2,000 to buy a nice iBook G4 laptop — fully-loaded with a 14-inch monitor and wifi — for yours truly, who has become one of the most prolific posters at the new site.
Me with the new laptop at my desk at the Virginian-Pilot in
February 2005. I usually made a point of posting my VizEds
work at home, rather than at work. Besides, I didn’t have
access to the Pilot’s wifi signal anyway.
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[Seriously, I never really intended to do all that I did. I was so excited about VizEds and I wanted folks to be impressed with the possiblities, so I started posting news items as fast as I could, with the intent of starting discussion. If figured if they saw good content, they'd come back and the site would grow.
Within a year or so, users were sending me items "for your blog." I don't have a blog, I'd tell them. But folks began to refer to the forums as such anyway.
Got to admit, though, we did manage to match a lot of people up with new jobs. Had I known how many people would get jobs as a direct result of VizEds, I'd have kept a list.
The laptop incident was kind of a turning point for me. From this point onward, I considered myself VizEds' only paid employee. I've tried hard to live up to that honor.]
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MARCH 7, 2005The Editors Weblog notes that in its first year of existence:
VizEds has grown to more than 1,500 members and has posted over 10,000 articles and pages about journalistic trends and techniques. Robb Montgomery, of the Chicago Sun Times, is the editor of the site.
The home page as it appeared in early 2006.
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AUG. 5, 2005Robb produces the first VizEds podcast. Shortly, he begins pushing into video production, getting college students involved in producing multimedia for the site. In addition to its other functions, VizEds becomes an active media lab.
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NOV. 4, 2005Anne Van Wagener, in an article for the Poynter web site, writes:
One of my favorite features in the [VizEds] redesign gallery is the Zoomify tool. One of the frustrating things about the launch of a new redesign is that I can’t see all of the pages. Usually just the front page from the Newseum site. Zoomify lets you look at all the details of a page. Pair that with a podcast with the designer talking about the redesign and you have a great case study.
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FEB. 22, 2007Realizing the diary I’ve written of my experiences as a judge at the annual SND contest doesn’t work quite so well as a series of bulletin board posts, I take Robb up on his suggestion that we post my work as a blog.
We post the first three parts of my eight-part judge’s diary. We post the next five parts the following day. Robb sets it all up with a nice Podcast to promote it.
Robb set up the blog more than a year before, but I had never used it. Over the next month or so, though, I gradually warm up to the format. By the time I help teach a three-day session in Manila a month later, I’m sold. I rarely post in the forums again.
By the time the VizEds forums eventually shut down, I’m credited with 3,734 posts. And that’s not counting all the ones that were deleted during periodic spring cleaning sweeps.
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MARCH 2007VizEds registers 1.2 million page views for the month, its all-time peak.
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JAN. 30, 2008Postings to the VizEds bulletin boards have dropped off and the once-booming chatroom has disappeared.
Rather than let the momentum die, Robb creates a new-and-improved VisualEditors.com, reinventing the project as a social networking site, ripe for uploading video, portfolios and where members can essentially write their own blogs.
The new and improved VizEds ning site as it appeared last night.
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MAY 2008VizEds expands into the field of actual hands-on education when Robb Montgomery holds the first Camp Video Journalism session in Chicago.
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AUG. 28, 2008Andrea Miller, a grad student at the University of West Virginia, publishes her masters’ thesis on the impact online communities — especially VizEds — has had on the field of news design.
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MARCH 9, 2009VizEds describes itself as “a 501(c)(3) non-profit founded in 2004. The charity operates an e-learning Web site that serves student and professional journalists in newsrooms and classrooms around the world.”
It serves 1,934 members, as of Sunday night.
Quite an animal you’ve created here, Robb. I don’t say it enough: Thanks for all you’ve done. And for all you continue to do.
And to all of you: Thanks for joining. Thanks for reading, for commenting, for participating. Thanks for fighting the good fight for visual journalism, in the face of an industry meltdown.
So what next? Where does VizEds go from here?
Tell us.
March 9th, 2009 at 10:34 am
Ah VizEds, where would I be without you? Oh, I know, not working in newspapers. I credit the places my career has gone largely to this site. It was directly responsible for at least one of my jobs. And many of my friends. (Including the guy who wrote this post.)
I miss the days of the VizEds chat – heady days indeed – but I appreciate the way this place has remained a community even through the downturn. Bravo, Robb. Bravo.
March 9th, 2009 at 2:31 pm
VizEds was such an instrumental part of my early development as a newspaper designer, giving me a place to get feedback, to get a feel for design trends, and to pick the brains of the great ones in the biz. I miss the days when the forums were bubbling w/ activity.
Thanks Robb, for creating something that has helped so many.
March 9th, 2009 at 4:56 pm
It’s hard to image it’s been five years since the start of VisualEditors. I think we’re all grayer in the past five years. Who would have imagined the industry would have changed so much.
VisualEditors played a part in myself moving from the Las Vegas Review-Journal to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel (before we lost the hyphen as South Florida). Denise Reagan, news designer director at the Sun-Sentinel, had been posting on the site, like myself. It served as a good way to first communicate with her on the phone. The rest is history.
I fondly recall meeting so many posters, including the famous Charles Apple, at the conference and specifically people at the the luncheon.
Let’s hope in five years times are a lot happy for journalists.
March 9th, 2009 at 8:39 pm
Wow. I was reading this on my iPhone at a Cracker Barrel outside of St. Louis this morning (en route back home from a teaching gig for APME Newstrain) and I could not believe how much of our short history I was in danger of forgetting. Thanks for digging through the forums and documenting our progress to date.
The Visual Editors non-profit charity is still in business thanks to you and to the countless volunteers listed here and many more who aren’t.
Five years feels like 10 doesn’t it? Visual media skills matter more now than ever, so stay with us, VizEds remains ready and able to serve as your living classroom.
Robb Montgomery
Founder and Board secretary
Visual Editors, NFP
visual editors.org
visualeditors.com
March 9th, 2009 at 9:56 pm
I have fond memories of Vizeds in Spring Summer of 2004. I wasn’t one of the very first to join , but when I did, and when I frequented the chatroom at the ends of my shifts, it was very cool. The chatroom is where I “met†Chuck, Jessmer, McBee, Gooch and a range of other misfits.
Charles actually tried to offer jobs to Jessmer and me at the time! Hard to believe that all three of us are not really in the biz anymore. My life has not been the same since (I think in a good way) Luckily SND was in San Jose in 2004, so I was able to cement the friendships in a venue close to my work.
I had plenty of time back then since my second child was still “in the oven†but now I have three boys and 2 home businesses, so I am very glad for the time I do spend on Vizeds, this blog and on Facebook (and now Twitter) with all you misfits. :-)
March 10th, 2009 at 2:12 am
Its my fourth year at visualeditor.com.May be Iam the first active member from India(Is it right Robb?).Many of my friends at visualeditor.com knew how much I have benifeted from the site.Chat room had helped me to exchange ideas and thoughts.It has created a new outlook.
Thanks Robb and co.
tksajeev