Dean Krakel's story from Ethiopia

Dean Krakel was featured in my series, "A New Life," about how journalists are reinventing themselves. In that installment, he described his dreams for his rafting trip down the Omo River (above). Today he shares the reality he experienced in Ethiopia.




So there we were, my friend Max, guide Jane Dicey and me, in Addis Ababa with our rafting equipment strung out all over the parking lot of the Pacific Hotel, ready to lock and load and head south to the Bele Bridge for the launch of our rafting adventure on the Omo River.

But we weren’t going anywhere. The Ethiopian government acting in conjunction with EEPCO (Ethiopian Electric Power Corporation) had denied our permit.

No reason given.

It was a crushing blow to Max and me. The Gibe II hydropower dam is nearly complete and another dam, the Gibe III is in the planning stages. Our raft trip was a once in a lifetime opportunity to run one of the last, large free-flowing rivers in Africa; a chance to experience a wilderness few roads penetrate and document a wild land populated with wild people before it was forever changed.

Max and I had invested nearly every dollar we had into the trip along with a boatload of hopes, dreams and expectations. It seemed in those moments we had taken a big gamble and lost.

For the next five days, Max, Jane (below) and I navigated the streets of Addis in a score of blue and white taxis, visiting one government minister after another trying to gain the necessary letter of approval that would free us to move.


Maybe in a few weeks or a few months something could be done to help us. Maybe not.

Our rafting trip had come at a very inopportune time politically, Fassil Yilma at the U.S. embassy told us. Environmentally the issue is very sensitive. Billions of dollars was at stake. The Ethiopian government wants the dams completed. The country needs the power and profit that would be generated.

It was a matter best not pushed, Mr. Yilma said, or the government might push back.

The public relations director for EEPCO talked in big elaborate circles that all came back around to, “No.” Activity around the dam’s construction was dangerous. Our rafting would be a disruption to work and a distraction to the workers. We would not be allowed to portage our equipment around the dam. Could we float the upper river above the dam? we asked. No. Could we put in below the dam and float the lower river? we asked. No.

Doors closed. Phones went unanswered. Police at the Bele Bridge would be instructed to stop us if we decided to try without permission.

I had been asked to make a list of camera equipment so that it could be determined if it was “professional” gear. The unspoken message to me was that if I were truly a journalist and not just a tourist on vacation, any story about the Omo would be considered inappropriate. When a river is being dammed and a downstream culture that has depended upon the water’s seasonal ebb and flow for thousands of years is threatened, there is no such thing as positive publicity. Better to drown the valley silently.

People we told our story to tended to shrug and say, “It’s Africa.”

Not to be entirely stymied, Max and I came up with Plan B. We’d rent a land cruiser, driver and translator, load up camping gear and some of the food we’d have eaten on the raft trip and head overland into southern Ethiopia. In the two places where it connected with a road, the Bele Bridge and the Greek hunting camp of Murle, we would be able to reach the Omo.

Along the way we’d be able to visit the dryland versions of tribes we’d have met on the river, Although we would miss interacting with the more primitive tribes we would have encountered along the river, the Hamer (chief below), Karo, Mursi and Bana people along with a score of others.


Frankly, the prospect of making this trip gave me more jitters than the rafting trip had - and those jitters were considerable. There is little traffic in that part of Ethiopia and distances are vast. Everybody walks. For thousands of cattle, goats, donkeys and people the roads are simply big trails between grazing lands and villages. There would be no cell phone coverage in the remotest parts of where were going, no supermarkets, fast food franchises, no gas stations at convenient intervals.

What if we broke down or rain or rockfall made the roads impassable? What if our paperwork was denied at one of the various checkpoints? What if we stumbled into some minor tribal skirmish or border war? How would we be received by the tribes and how would we deal with the constant press of people that surrounded us every time we stopped the cruiser? What of the bandits rumored to surface along the road at night? Not to mention the animal factor, the lion and cape buffalo, poisonous snakes and insects, the tetse flies and malaria packing mosquitos.

Our driver,Tekle, (above) had been knocking around Ethiopia for twenty years and knew the land and how to get around. Endalk, the translator, better known as Michael (below), had grown up in one of the southern villages and had been down the Omo four times working for rafting expeditions. Michael knew the tribes, their languages and customs. If he didn’t have a personal connection in one of the villages he could at least find someone who knew someone who could help. And most importantly, Michael knew whom to pay and how much to pay for access along the way. Everything in Africa runs on bier notes and nothing happens without dropping a few.


And so for 1400 miles of mostly dirt Ethiopian road we threaded the needle of humanity and animals, weaving and honking and bumping and grinding our way south and back.

Near Turmi, in the village of Dumbar, we sat in a smoky Hamer (dancing below) lodge drinking coffee while visiting in our limited fashion with the village chief, his deputies and assorted relations.They were curious about what kind of vessel we drank coffee from at home if not from gourds. We gave them oranges and apples and watched their faces light up with delight at the taste. In return they killed and roasted a goat and served it to us fresh from the fire under an incredible star spangled African sky.


To reach a wedding in the remote village of Unga Bayno we drove up a dry river bed and then went on foot into the bush, walking into a scene so other worldly it was if we had tumbled down the rabbit hole in Alice’s wonderland.

On the following day we returned. Seated on a cowhide under an arbor of leaves surrounded by a pressing, murmuring crowd of dozens of curious onlookers, Max (below) treated assorted eye problems and injuries with his medical kit. One man, bitten by a cobra, had hacked his own leg off with a machete. Among these people a baby born with a defect will be taken away from the village and left to die. Only the strongest can survive.

At Murle we reached the Omo for the first time at what would have been our rafting trip's takeout. There an old Karo woman showed me how to scare the crocs (cooguru) away from the river bank….after I’d already squatted at the water’s edge and dipped my hands into it.

We spent two nights listening to the sounds of baboons barking and the croaking of colabus monkeys as they swung through the trees near our tent, awakening to so much birdsong it was like being in an aviary.

The air at Murle was thick with the billowing dust of goat and cattle herds being herded to and from the Omo for water by Karo warriors, all packing Kalashnikov and chewing Kat, the local stimulant of choice.

We watched as locals fished for giant catfish with hand lines and were serenaded and pestered by a parade of children who followed us everywhere. I dazzled onlookers with the bluish light of my steri pen as we purified our water. “But the water is already good,” said one young woman. “He is making it better,” replied Michael.

Far into Mago National Park we met the Mursi people and were repulsed by their swirling, in your face, chest poking, arm grabbing aggressiveness and incessant demands for money in exchange for photos. The threat of violence seemed imminent if the proper amount wasn’t forthcoming. By park regulations we were required to travel with an armed guard.

The Mursi are not a people you want to bump into alone or after dark. Chances are you wouldn’t be around come dawn. They war with other tribes, have murdered tourists and used to terrorize the local town of Jinka on market day. When Pasquale Saccuro, leader of the second expedition to descend the Omo, asked me how it’d gone with the Mursi, I told him, “okay.” He replied, “Things can go from being okay to a bullet in a heartbeat with the Mursi.”

Our last contact with the Omo was at Bele Bridge, near the end of our trip. We shook hands with the policeman guarding the bridge with it his Ak-47. Yes, he said, he would have stopped us from floating the river.

Max and I spent the afternoon by the river beneath the bridge, thinking, talking, sitting silently, thinking, trying to put things into context. It’s funny in a way because we began our journey far south where our river trip would have ended and we ended our journey at the Bele Bridge where the river trip would have began. Everything about our trip had not happened as planned or expected.

I went to Africa in search of something, to find some part of myself and answer some of the questions in my life concerning the future in the aftermath of the Rocky Mountain News’ closing, my recent divorce.

Truthfully, sitting under the Bele Bridge beside the Omo I couldn’t even think of the questions I meant to ask or the answers I had hoped to receive.

I felt so overwhelmed and overloaded by the different cultures that we had experienced that the old me had seemed to shrink away in order to make room for other things to fill me up.

Our journey seemed like one long strange dream of voices and songs, dust and goat blood, humming insects, painted faces, suffocating heat, violent rain storms, a thousand shades of jungle green and a thousand shades of desert brown, bright pink elephant flowers in bloom, a million wild sights, sounds, smells and tastes, a kaleidoscope of colors and impressions that fill my mind night and day as if I’ve taken a drug that has forever altered my consciousness and will not shut off even in sleep.

In the three weeks that we were gone I never felt one bad vibe from anyone, not even when we accidentally broke through a roadblock. It was only a brown rope stretched across the road that it would have taken a bat’s radar to see, but still, instead of filling the cruiser full of holes with an automatic weapon the policeman rushed up and stuck his hand through the window to shake hands. No worries. Be happy.

I never heard one curse word, at least none I understood, saw no middle fingers extended even in the worst, most confusing traffic jams or from people in the road that we had to honk at; I saw no anger, no unhappiness, no envy. Mursi excluded. There is no word for please or thank you in Mursi.

People exist on so little, ask for so little, and are so happy with what they have, happy to be alive, happy to have jobs no matter how trivial or unimportant those jobs might seem to us; happy to be here today, now, in the moment.


In a market place I saw a beggar give another beggar a coin, as if to say, hey buddy, I’m bad off too but I have more than you, let me give you a hand. That moment fits in well with my one overriding impression of Ethiopia: an outstretched hand and a big smile.

When you begin a journey you never know how it will come out. That is part of the mystery. Part of the fear. Part of the joy. Max and I started out on one kind of trip and ended up on something else. The outcome is still out there somewhere, like a ghost of Ethiopia that I may continue to chase for the rest of my life.

To reach Dean Krakel: dkrakel@gmail.com

Dean Krakel returns safely with a good story from Omo River adventure in Ethiopia

I wrote on Aug. 19 about Dean Krakel, former director of photography for the Rocky Mountain News, going on a rafting adventure down the Omo River in Ethiopia. His story was probably the wildest of any from former Rocky employees.

Well, Dean got back safely to Colorado on Saturday, with a different story than he might have expected, but nonetheless he wrote me that it was a "wonderful trip."

I should have a story from Dean in the next day or two. But here's a quick taste of what he experienced.

"We drove 1400 miles in the land cruiser, over mostly dirt roads. We drove up riverbeds and in some cases walked to find the people. We were able to make it to the Omo River in two places and got to meet the guy with an AK-47 who was waiting for us at the Bele bridge, what would have been our launch point.

"I think i have a good story and did some of my best photo work. My heart cracked open like an egg. I love Ethiopia. So much of that country is like the west must have been, just little wild frontier towns with villages at the edges and even wilder people beyond. Getting an education is huge there. I had so many people approach me about helping them get books, or pens or paper or help with sponsoring them for school, big strapping high school sized kids who are still in primary grades.

"So many impressions. Africa is like being on a drug or being like Alice and tumbling down the rabbit hole. You just see amazing things every minute and for every photo you get you've missed a hundred others."

More to come...

** The photo by Dean Krakel shows a young Karo girl above the Omo.

PULITZERS LOST, WHAT A COST - Cheryl Diaz Meyer, 10th in a series on the impact of thousands of job cuts at America's newspapers

Cheryl Diaz Meyer and David Leeson won the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography in 2004 for their coverage of the Iraq war for the Dallas Morning News. Today, Diaz Meyer no longer works at the paper. Neither does Leeson. And it's questionable whether the paper would assign photojournalists to do the same type of courageous work overseas again.

That says a lot about why I'm publishing this series, "Pulitzers Lost, What a Cost." It's an attempt to get at what it means for society, journalism and journalists that so many talented people have been spun out, bought out or shut out of newspaper newsrooms in the past few years.

The Pulitzer board cited Diaz Meyer and Leeson for "their eloquent photographs depicting both the violence and poignancy of the war with Iraq." What happens when eloquence is silenced at major news organizations? Diaz Meyer and Leeson are still working. (You can see her work on her personal web site and read more about her latest project in her comments below.) But there's no question in reading her reflections on the state of the newspaper industry that we're paying a price for what's happening in newsrooms across the country.



1. Name, age, final paper.

Cheryl Diaz Meyer, 41, The Dallas Morning News

2. What work did you win Pulitzer for, when?

I won the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography in 2004 with my colleague David Leeson for our coverage of the Iraq invasion.

3. Why did you leave your newspaper? When?

I was part of a company downsizing in April, 2009.

4. What are you doing now?

I am currently editing a story that I photographed on the native and mystic healing arts of the Philippines, specifically how these beliefs marry with Christianity. The story drew me from one side of the country to the other as I interviewed, photographed and audio-recorded subjects for a photo story, written story and multimedia piece.

Any reflections on life after newspapers?

The problem with the catastrophic condition of the newspaper and magazine industry today is that as journalists leave the business in droves, those who are truly passionate about journalism and care to continue working at their craft are now seeking alternative ways to make a living. Some of the most talented journalists in our industry are biding time, trying to make a living doing commercial work, non-profit work, teaching—the journalism skills they have spent years honing are squandered by an economy that cannot support them. This is a loss to our society; and in the larger sense, it’s a loss to our democracy because ultimately the press acts as our country’s watchdog.

In photojournalism particularly, the conversations turn to “monetizing photographs.” Photojournalists increasingly are creating alliances with their subjects who then finance the work. Some say this is not journalism, but public relations. The question does arise, what happens to the journalism if the subject is paying for it?

The paradigm for freelance photojournalism doesn’t exist anymore and yet all who care deeply about the value of journalism want desperately to redefine it, fix it, make it work again.

5. What do you hope to do going forward? Will you stay in journalism? How?

I am passionate about telling stories through photography and I will continue to do so regardless of how the format changes. I will build on the affiliations I already have with media organizations and seek out other kinds of clients who are interested in storytelling images.

I’ve always viewed journalism as an honorable calling, but now we also have to be entrepreneurs. This skill, and one’s ability to adjust to the new technological environment, will probably distinguish who will come out of this crisis still standing.

6. What has the downsizing of your former newsroom or closing of your former paper meant to the quality of journalism in your community? For example, are there types of stories not being told? You could use your own experience to provide examples here.

The photojournalism at The Dallas Morning News has been renowned as some of the best in the world. For many years, the company leaders saw themselves as competitors with the New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and other news behemoths. They were aggressive in their coverage, reporting stories that were of international, national and local importance.

Yet after two Pulitzer Prizes for photography in 2004 and 2006, the publisher stated that he would not support the coverage of stories like the Iraq invasion or Hurricane Katrina, for which those Pulitzers were awarded, if they happened today.

So the paper’s readers on the local level, and the web audience nationally and internationally, will not likely see this type of award-winning storytelling—and some of the best photojournalism is not going to happen at The Dallas Morning News because there is no support for it. The good thing is that the company does continue its focus on hard-hitting local stories, and they have not given up on quality journalism. But I sincerely hope that their turn away from national and international news stories is a response to the economic downturn and not a permanent philosophical change in the company’s vision.

In the meanwhile, my fellow Pulitzer Prize winner, David Leeson, took a buyout almost a year ago, and many other acclaimed photojournalists who joined the staff of the DMN over the past 20 years are no longer with the paper. When I began covering wars in 2001, I tapped Leeson for his knowledge of such dangerous assignments. The loss of institutional knowledge caused by the collective departure of so many seasoned journalists is, in the long term, a crisis for our profession.

7. What, if anything, do you think your newspaper should have done differently to prevent the downsizing or closure that cost you your job?

The Dallas Morning News could not and cannot save itself on its own—the changes that need to happen are industry wide. Giving away content for free, as most media organizations do on the web, is an unsustainable business model. But few have the gumption to charge for it. If all media organizations charged for content, it would become the norm. A year ago, airlines announced that checked bags would incur a fee; most fliers balked, but now it is an accepted cost of flying because almost all airline companies charge.

I’m a fan of micropayments for the web. In the Philippines where an average teacher’s salary is $350 per month, even those earning much less will carry a cell phone, if not two. They easily accrue $10 to $20 in texting fees each month, which is considered palatable because they pay incrementally for the usage. Apple successfully uses a similar business model with iTunes.
Viewers will not balk to pay pennies for a story online, especially if there is no free lunch out there.

The Financial Times has been charging a subscription fee for online content since 2002 and is about to add the option of a micropayment system. As most news organizations struggle to find a solution to falling ad revenue, I think they would benefit from a little solidarity.

8. What would you advise young people wanting to pursue a life in journalism today?

Journalism is a calling, and if you truly feel the call, follow your heart. Because although these are painfully challenging times, you will know no other job more fulfilling and adventuresome.

To read previous installments: Deborah Nelson, Andrew Schneider, Kim Komenich, Janet Reeves, Jerry Kammer, Paul Giblin, Tamara Jones, Glenn Frankel and Joe Demma.

AP right to distribute photo Defense Secretary Gates urged news agency to hold

The question of how to handle photos of the dead - fallen in war or in attacks on our own soil, such as Columbine - is never easy for editors.

But the Associated Press is in a different position from a local newspaper. Its role is to provide its members and customers content that they decide what to do with. As a former editor who used to work with AP, the last thing I wanted the agency to do was hold back on content. Every day pictures streamed into our newsroom that would never see the light of day for a number of reasons, including that they were too graphic without a reason to justify showing the bloodshed. But that was our decision, not the decision of the editors at AP.

Clearly the AP photographer traveling with the troops when Lance Cpl. Joshua Bernard was hit was there under certain ground rules. I don't know what they were, but I'm hoping they were that she was free to use her own judgment about what to distribute. That appears to be the case from the excellent story that went with her photos.

But the most important reason I appreciate AP editors making the decision to distribute the photo as part of a package of photos on Bernard is that it can't be left up to the family of the fallen or the defense secretary what Americans will see of a war the country is engaged in. I have the experience of Columbine to inform my thinking on such matters. I chose to publish a photo of a dead child on the sidewalk outside the school. It was an excruciating decision. The family disagreed with it at the time. But a few years later their view changed. They came to feel that people needed to see the truth and thanked me for having the courage to publish the photo. They encouraged me to have the courage to publish difficult photos in the future.

There's no doubt that the photo AP moved was a difficult photo. But the wire service did the right thing by distributing it.

There are ways to publish troubling photos. One is to prepare newspaper readers for it by not printing it on the front page. Then parents can make the decision whether they want their children to see it.

I can understand why Defense Secretary Gates might go to bat for the family and try to stop distribution of the photo. But I think it would be better for him to show what distinguishes the United States from its enemies, and one of those things is a free press. Such cases are not easy for anyone. The family's grief is profound and immeasurable. I believe the nation shares in it in some small way. Nobody wants to deepen their suffering. On the other hand, the obligation of news organizations is to inform their readers. Part of that job is to show the actual cost of war.

Dean Krakel's adventure rafting Ethiopia's Omo River hits government snag

Former Rocky Mountain News Director of Photography won the admiration of many of his colleagues with his willingness to take risks after the closure of the paper. His story of his planned trip rafting the Omo River in Ethiopia was the kind of adventure others just marveled at. Now it appears he's hit a government snag.

This morning I found a short e-mail from Dean in Addis Ababa. He indicated that the government there is blocking his trip.

Here's what he wrote:

hi john, in addis here. we have just received a letter and are being denied permission to float the omo by the ethiopian government. we surmise that this is because of the dam and the controversy surrounding it. they have police at the launch. we are working with the embassy and pulling all the strings we can. if you can think of anything....please let me know.

best,

dean

Here's the last e-mail I received from him just before he left for Africa.

well, our trip has shrunk. now, max and i and an unknown brit, a translator, a guide and two rafts. max and i will have our own raft. we are now taking enough equipment to carry through on our own if everything falls through. we met with pasquale,(remember him from the nile story that james did?) and he gave us his omo river logs and also the maps he made and the maps he got from the russians. he and kenny dowd of buena vista made the second descent and he, in his own words, knows the omo better than any man alive. he has equipment, rafts, over in addis that we can use if we need too. he gave us advice on the crocs (lots of them and big ones too) and the hippos (splash your oars in the eddy's to drive them out before you park your raft) and the locals (they want money, not razor blades like they did ten years ago). even with his maps the omo is pretty much a big blank space.

i've got lots of cards, a good digital recorder and video. multi media on the omo. oh boy.

so we are off at 3 am tomorrow morning.

thank you for all your help and support. touch base with you in a month i hope.

dean

A NEW LIFE: Journalists on how they reinvented themselves - Part 5 - Dean Krakel, from Rocky Mountain News photo editor to adventure in Africa

Dean Krakel worked with me at the Rocky Mountain News for almost the entire 17 years I was there. When I first met him, he was a photographer shooting a photo column called "Krakel's West." His photos and captions captured the modern American West and were collected in a book. He went on to become a photo editor and ultimately director of photography, working with Janet Reeves, who became the paper's senior editor for multimedia and photography. Dean wasn't just a visual journalist at the Rocky. He was also a writer and an adventurer, always taking off on rafting trips and other journeys, some of which he chronicled for the paper.

Now he's planning on his biggest adventure ever. A trip down the length of the Omo River in Africa. I share his story as part of the series, "A New Life." At this time of wrenching change in the newspaper business, I hope it's encouraging for those caught in the storm to see that there's life after your newsroom has no place for you anymore. If you don't believe it, listen to Dean Krakel.

Photo by Stuart Ringer

"Imagine for a moment a river so mighty that it has carved out a 4,000-foot canyon of immense proportions, beauty and complexity, yet almost totally unknown except to a handful of the world's cartographers. Imagine, too, this river flowing for countless eons and yet so isolated from human affairs as to exist completely outside human history. Imagine all this and then give the river a name. Call it the Omo."

- Richard Bangs, Sobek Expeditions.

When I’m asked what it was like when the Rocky stopped publishing and what the closing meant for me I always have to take a long pause. The sorting out is not over yet. I’m still searching for answers. It may take the rest of my life to arrive at some kind of peace with what I find out.

I was at the paper for over 20 years, starting out as a staff photographer and ending with a brief term as Director of Photography. I’m glad I didn’t get the jitters and leave early when it was announced that the paper would be sold or closed. There’s certain poetry in riding the rocket all the way down. Our last two days were among our best.

Months before the paper closed my marriage of 35 years ended in divorce. In one fell swoop I lost two things I loved and two of the things that were the most stable in my life. I was in free fall for a long time and only recently has the wind quit whistling past my ears and have I found myself on a kind of ledge where I can breathe and look around.

The first few months for me were filled with a kind of stunned disbelief, a wake-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night, heart pounding, breath-quickening panic. The divorce was financially devastating. Now I didn’t even have a job. I was in emotional tatters from two major life-changing events. What was I going to do? Where would the money come from? Would I lose the house? What about our boys, one in high school and the other just starting college? What about this? What about that? The age of 57 seems a little late to be trying to figure out what you’re going to be doing in life.

During the last weeks at the paper I used to joke about taking a long vacation and going skiing all the time. Instead that sense of panic rolled me out of bed each and every morning as I immediately began looking for work. Since then I’ve cooked Chinese food for $8 an hour, cut trees for fire mitigation and began doing some freelance photo editing. The happiest thing for me is that I have once again started writing and taking photographs, skills that were placed on the back burner when I became an editor.

I have always loved rivers. In times of trouble I have always turned to moving water for comfort and answers. Rafting or kayaking always seems to put things in perspective for me. Despite the cliché, it really is true, life is like a river. You learn to go with the flow, even if that means sometimes going upstream; life’s challenges are a bit like rapids, you study the current, pick your line and then paddle or row like hell. One way or another you usually come out the other side.

So, what do you do when you love rivers, you’re divorced, unemployed, have very few prospects and are a bit undecided about your course in life? If you’re me, you buy a plane ticket to Addis Ababa in Ethiopia and join your friend Mad Max on a month long rafting trip down the Omo River.

The Omo rises in the Simien Mountains and flows 621 miles to Lake Turkana in Kenya. It flows through one of the most remote and wildest parts of Africa. One of the last remaining true wildernesses on the planet.

It is said that if Africa is the mother of all humanity then the Omo has been the main artery. The oldest known hominid fossil was found in the Omo Valley.

Every African animal you can name, and some you can’t, call the Omo home. The banks teem with Hippo and Crocodiles. Well, teem may not be a good term. Yikes. But there are lots, okay. In Hippo Alley we may have to delicately navigate through as many as 200 of them. In the jungle canopy are amazing numbers of birds and monkeys.

As many as 45 different tribes of people live along the Omo. Most have had limited contact with the outside world. On this trip we’ll be mainly interacting with members of the Bodi and Mursi tribes. The Mursi, historically, have been the fiercest and are known to the outside world by the fantastic clay plates that the women wear in their lips and the tattoos the men decorate themselves with to denote that they have killed an enemy.

The first raft trip down the Omo took place in 1973. Only a few hundred people have been down the river since. Unfortunately our trip will be one of the last descents. A series of hydroelectric dams are planned on the Omo. One, the Gibe II, is scheduled to go online at the end of September, forever altering the river’s flow. We will have to portage our rafts and equipment, somehow, across this dam, now 98% complete.

I’ve always admired the paintings of Karl Bodmer, one of the first artists to journey up the Missouri River to paint and sketch the wild places and people of the early west. His art remains the only record we have of a lost world.

In late June, when Max, owner of Renaissance Adventure Guides, invited me to travel along with him on a trip down the Omo with his partner company in Great Britain, Water by Nature, I saw it as a chance to fulfill a dream and play Karl Bodmer. But I was totally undecided until two weeks ago. Going to Africa is expensive and rafting down the Omo doubly so. A huge leap for an unemployed guy with limited resources. The question I turned over and over in my mind was, "Could I afford to go?" But then the question became, "Can I afford not to go?" There won’t be any more Omo River as it exists now in the very near future. This is my chance to document the story of one of the last raft trips down a great free flowing river.

My friend, Richard Murphy, Director of Photography at the Anchorage Daily News, helped me make the decision when he emailed me and said that if I lived a long life it would just give me all that much more time to regret not going and that the money I saved by not going would just allow people to drink expensive tequila at my wake. He added that when I ran out of money I could come live with him in Alaska.

Today, two weeks from leaving for Ethiopia I sit in my house surrounded by ever-growing piles of photo gear and other equipment. But I find myself still torn. I’m leaving so much behind. The slight living I have been cobbling together. My sons. My life here. It’s a gamble, one of the greatest in my life so far, that I’ll be able to take a big leap to another continent and come back home with a good tale to tell the readers back home. It’s so foreign to me in some ways and yet again so familiar. After all that’s exactly what we did at the Rocky Mountain News.

Dean Krakel can be reached at dkrakel@gmail.com.

If you know of others whose stories I should tell as part of this series on journalists reinventing themselves, please let me know at jtemplermn@gmail.com.

Thank you.

John Temple

To read earlier installments of the series: ME Sprengelmeyer, Jay Bryant, Julie Hutchinson, Reggie Rivers.

What local newspapers should do: A final thought on the importance of photojournalism

My series on 10 steps local newspapers should take to survive and thrive in the face of the economic meltdown and the societal shift to the Internet raised a good question from a former colleague, Jay Small.

Here's what he wrote:

"I wanted to ask about something I don't see mentioned much: the role and value of photography and photojournalism in the future of content strategy. Most discussion I see zeroes in on the local public service/watchdog/Fourth Estate archetypes of journalism. Meanwhile, at street level, we keep seeing how powerful photographs and galleries can be as drivers of traffic and engagement. I, for one, do not believe video supplants still photography even online.

Is great photography strategic, or just another tool in the box?"

I'll share part of my response and elaborate:

"I think a news organization has to put at its center a public service mission because it elevates the work to a higher standard and a higher calling. That said, photo is very much a part of that watchdog mission. Think about the great documentary photojournalism that has changed the world because it's shown people things they haven't known about or wanted to see. So maybe this is a bad answer, but it's probably both strategic and a tool in the box...One thing I've been thinking about is how most news sites look pretty much the same and that means they're text driven. Yet you see Microsoft's Steve Ballmer talking about the differences between media having disappeared in 10 years. Why aren't Web sites more visual? What if I could wake up in the morning and instead of watching the Today show have a web aggregation of great news photos (perhaps with narration and certainly with captions available) floating across my screen, with me being able to stop the flow of images any time I want with my remote?"

Most people running newsrooms - and that includes digital newsrooms - came up on the "word" side. It always bugged me to be called a "word person." But it is true that the perspective of most top editors is text first. That said, we've moved into a much more visual world and readers both expect and appreciate a much richer visual experience. Jay Small is right that still photography can play a huge role in making local newspapers more central to their communities. Watching events unfold in Iran reconfirms the significance and impact of photographs from people armed with cell phones. This is probably the most significant way that the public will contribute content, if newspapers make it easy for them to do so and reward contributors by treating their work with respect. To me, photography (by staff and others) should be the lifeblood of any good news organization because it forces journalists to concentrate on what is actually happening, and not on telephone interviews or reconstructions after the fact. It puts an organization into the position of always trying to show, not tell. That approach is central to good watchdog journalism. Good photojournalism creates a sense of urgency and wonder, depth and intimacy - all things that would draw people back day after day because the experience is something they'll remember. Newspapers have been, in my view, too dry for too long. Good photojournalism makes any publication come alive, makes its readers connect and feel, puts them into the shoes of others. Good photojournalism opens the world, which is what local newspapers should be doing. I can't be everywhere in my city every day, or everywhere in the world, but people are taking pictures across the city and globe every day, and if they're put together in the right way it will make the reader feel part of something larger, make the reader care about his or her community, make the reader an engaged citizen - and at the same time give pleasure.

So, yes, Jay Small is correct. Photo is a powerful tool, but it can also be strategic, because handled well it positions a news organization in reality, in a real place in real time, a place readers can relate to, a place where they don't just see, but also feel. And if they feel, they'll remember the experience, and come back for more. That's why photojournalism is so important, but it's also why local newspapers should embrace the work of all the people in their communities with eyes - and cameras - on the street.