Last week I gave a presentation about the media to the Middle School and let them in on a secret. This week, Forbes.com will announce that it considers Trinity to be one of the top twenty schools in the nation. Not surprisingly, this news was received rather enthusiastically by the Middle School students. I asked them to demonstrate, by a show of hands, who thought that I would be pleased by this news and who thought that I would be displeased by this news. Interestingly, the votes were about even…which could be interpreted as a sign that Middle School students have a keen understanding that adults react unpredictably to what some would consider good news.
I’ve been dealing with the “rankings” issue ever since I arrived at Trinity. (Well, I’ve been dealing with it since before I arrived at Trinity, but this is a Trinity blog after all…) For years I have dreaded the annual telephone call from the Wall Street Journal (“WSJ”) in preparation for their annual ranking of schools. The difficulty, year after year, has been to try to get the reporters to understand three things. First, that the ranking by the “WSJ” or any other media outlet does not affect in the least how we serve the students of the School. Second, that such rankings truly do harm as they feed the fallacy that there is a “best” school or college. Third, that there is little qualitative or quantitative data that captures what any school does...successfully or otherwise.
Several years ago ...

Those of you who were around Trinity last Thursday during any of the three dismissals may have noticed what, in the industry, is referred to as an ENG (electronic news-gathering) crew standing on the corner of 91st Street and Columbus. While this term is applied to a variety of configurations, in this case it was a videographer and a reporter. To those who sent me a text message or an e-mail or who called to alert me to the arrival of the ENG crew…thank you. I received my first alert from Trinity’s security team around 2:35pm and I went out to chat with the two journalists. They were from Teen News (http://wn.com/TeenNews), which is currently a subsidiary of WN Network. WN Network operates a kind of news portal Web site that pulls heavily from international online sources (AP, AFP, etc.) but also generates its own content. Teen News visits Trinity about one dozen times every year and has a decidedly pop-culture orientation. Thursday’s visit focused on tampons and menstrual cycles, but in the broader media context the topic was really Kloe Kardashian’s role in the new Kotex advertising campaign.

It is this relationship between commerce and “news” that I find endlessly fascinating. Kimberly-Clark, which owns the Kotex brand, launched a new product line in March of this year: U by Kotex. The marketing of the product has taken the Kotex brand into dramatically new design directions and has been followed by an aggressively promoted advertising campaign designed by Marina Maher Communications…a ...

The spring athletics season is upon us, which means that it is time for me to be on the team buses headed out to Randall’s Island as well as to a few of the other schools in the leagues in which we compete. I provide photographic coverage of all the varsity teams for use on this Web site and in the Trinity School calendar and coverage of one Middle School team, also for use in the calendar. Occasionally the Trinity Times and the Bruner make use of my images, although they do have their own photographers.

Parents and students regularly ask me for tips about photographing athletics, and the beginning of the spring season seems like a good time to share my approach to the sports of the season. Generally, I think that the spring teams can be divided into the “Long Lens Sports” and the “Middle Lens Sports.”

The Long Lens Sports
For those of you who have been to any of the lacrosse, baseball, or softball games that I have covered you have certainly seen the long lens that I bring to those events. It looks like a professional lens and it is. The 400mm f/2.8 is a monster: the barrel is fourteen inches in length, the lens shade adds another seven inches, and the lens weighs about twelve pounds. At six degrees it has an exceptionally narrow angle of view with a magnification of 1:6.6. It’s a great lens for those sports where the action could be anywhere on the field. ...