David Walker

Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist and newspaper video pioneer David Leeson has accepted a buyout from The Dallas Morning News, and will leave the paper this month. Leeson says he is already busy with freelance documentary projects that he hopes will demonstrate how newspaper photojournalism can be saved.

"My business card will say filmmaker, but photojournalism is what I do," says Leeson, who joined The Dallas Morning News in 1984.

Leeson was one of 270 DMN staffers to take buyouts in a company-wide cutback by A.H. Belo Corporation, the paper’s owner. Another 142 journalists also took buyouts at The Press-Enterprise in Riverside, California and The Providence Journal, two other Belo papers.

The reductions reflect a trend in the newspaper industry. As papers lose readers and advertising dollars to the web, publishers are being forced to cut costs.

Leeson has been experimenting with new media since 2000, when he began shooting video for The Dallas Morning News. More recently, newspaper managers have embraced new media in their pursuit of web audiences. But Leeson charges that those managers have lost sight of their core values in the process.

"In times of change, [newspapers] scramble to grasp onto things that are not their core, and others can do them better," he says. For instance, publishers are rushing to turn journalists into videographers, he says. "The Youtube fairy is dancing in their brains at night. They’re focused on the one-minute video that gets 50 billion hits."

"We need to stick to a core. And that’s journalism," Leeson says. "The Internet, blogging—all those things begin to look like something different. But we’re not doing something different."

He hastens to add that his departure from The Dallas Morning News is amicable. "I’m not leaving with any bitterness or malice."

Leeson says he intends to set an example from the outside.

He hopes to demonstrate, for instance, that long-term documentary projects—"the most endangered species of newspaper photojournalism," he says—can  be saved by breaking big stories down into shorter multimedia stories that stand alone. "On top of shooting the individual stories, though, you shoot all the things that you’re need later to piece them together" into a long documentary, he explains.

"Newspapers are perfectly poised to be the biggest competitors in documentary films," he asserts.

Leeson is trying to put his theory into practice with At War, a documentary film by Scott Kesterson about the war in Afghanistan that Leeson helped produce. He says he also hopes to demonstrate his theory with a video project about homelessness that he is currently shooting for AARP The Magazine.