Advice & inspiration

Tom Kennedy speaks about his evolution as a visual journalist

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Former managing editor for multimedia at The Washington Post Tom Kennedy recently gave a talk at The Knight Center for International Media at the University of Miami. Thankfully, the talk was videotaped, and it was recently uploaded to Vimeo for your viewing pleasure. I only caught the last half when it was covered live last Wednesday, so I went back and watched the first half tonight. I highly recommend putting it on in the background while you answer your morning emails, or while you eat lunch. His thoughts on digital media are right on and his advice is not to be missed!

Here are some of Tom’s 20 professional lessons that he spoke about during the 95 minute talk:

• Understand the value of passion
• Do not be competitive with your coworkers, but within yourself
• Know when it’s time to go – do not be afraid to move on
• Have the courage to be calm under pressure
• Be focused in the work you are doing, but be aware of what’s around you and anything that might impinge on your work
• Have patience and empathy with your story subjects in order to gain their trust
• Develop your own vision and creative identity

One quote from his talk particularly stuck with me, because I believe it is one of the most important pieces of advice anyone can currently give visual journalists:

“Consistently be willing to take informed risks and be willing to fail at what you do with the idea that by taking those risks you’re going to go to a place creatively that you haven’t been before and then maybe learn something that then can propel you to successes rather than failures moving forward.”

Other posts that might interest you:

• Slides from multimedia talk at DC Shootoff
• Rich Beckman discusses multimedia in recent videos, podcast
• II’s guide to grad school – the where, when and why (Part 3)

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