Q&A: Elodie Mailliet Storm on how CatchLight collaborates to improve visual journalism in local newsrooms
Elodie Mailliet Storm is the CEO of CatchLight, a nonprofit collaborative network that pairs visual journalists with local newsrooms to increase trust and representation in media.
Recently, CatchLight received $7.5M in funding to build out its local visual desk from California to newsrooms across the US, including a $1M investment through Press Forward.
We caught up with Mailliet Storm to hear about CatchLight’s local work and how she plans to grow this unique, effective collaborative model to many more communities across the country.
WF: How did you get started in journalism?
EMS: I started as a writer. I have a master’s in philosophy from a university in Paris, where I’m from. I then went for another master’s in journalism at Northwestern University. I graduated in 2001 and moved to Los Angeles, but there weren’t many journalism jobs there. I had a friend who suggested I work in photography. I worked at some agencies, and then I moved to New York and ended up working for Getty Images. I was there for about 12 years. We went from high-end exclusive placements for magazines to a world where images were sold by the hundreds of thousands to go into streams. As the digital evolution of media progressed, it was fascinating to watch the business models around photography evolve very rapidly as well.
At some point, I became in charge of content partnerships at Getty Images. I started talking to media organizations and understanding they were deeply challenged in their own business models. That was the moment where I felt like I needed to go back to my roots as an academic, and engage in some long-term thinking. I applied for and got the JSK fellowship at Stanford in 2016. I took that year to look at monetization and business models in media from a high-level perspective, and I also saw that there was a movement aimed at rebuilding media ecosystems in a different way. That became clear to me when I saw the success of places like the Texas Tribune, calling on philanthropy as a way to come into this space and help rebuild it. But there was very little that was connecting the photojournalism world to this larger media ecosystem.
WF: What made you want to help build CatchLight as a collaborative network for visual journalism?
EMS: Looking at the visual journalism ecosystem, there was a massive decline — local news organizations had lost 52% of visual journalist staff between 2009 and 2019. The paradox there is that we now consume most of our information visually, but many media organizations are not making the most of these tools to engage audiences. When looking at the local media ecosystem, what became clear is there is no way every organization can have access to these visual resources. How can we make the case for visual journalism? Can we create a collaborative model where that investment becomes tenable?
With CatchLight, that’s what we set out to do with our first pilot in the Bay Area in 2019. We got a small grant from the Kresge Foundation and we placed three visual journalists across the Bay Area, and our assumption was that it would increase engagement, and change the nature of local journalism in that newsroom for the long run. That’s what happened — all three newsrooms continued to invest in photojournalism after the pilot was over.
Readers spent about 30% more time engaging with visual Catchlight stories when compared to stories that did not have images. The Salinas Californian, where we placed David Rodríguez Muñoz, more than doubled their Instagram following. He stayed there four years before moving to the Detroit Free Press, and Yesica Prado still works for the San Francisco Public Press, where we originally placed her.
WF: How did CatchLight grow after the pilot?
EMS: From there, we did another pilot in Chicago in 2020, which lasted nine months. In 2021, we launched the CatchLight local visual desk, which serves newsrooms across California. Our goal is to serve as many newsrooms as we can. This year, we are going to add another six newsrooms, which will be the first time we go outside of California more broadly. By 2027, we want to serve at least 30 newsrooms, and up to 90 is our plan.
Starting small with pilots was key. Building on those and iterating is really important to understand what works and what doesn’t. It takes time for the trust to be built when placing visual journalists in newsrooms, so allowing for that time is a must. A lot of the people that we started with are still with us, because we started slow and built a lot of trust. We believe there should be lots of time and effort invested in collaboration, and that’s paid off.
WF: How do you choose which types of newsrooms to collaborate with?
EMS: We have done partnerships with various organizations, like INN and Report for America. That helped make people aware of who we were and helped us figure out who was interested in doing more visual journalism. Now, more newsrooms have learned about our work through the years, so we have a much longer list of newsrooms that have expressed interest.
Some newsrooms are more keen than others to do visual journalism, or they have ways of wanting to bring information to the public that aligns well with us. It’s also important for us to make sure that we bring information to audiences that might not be able to have it otherwise. We do serve larger newsrooms like CalMatters, which is important because we can help visualize policy issues that affect a lot of people in California, and those images carry very well to lots of different communities.
But we make it a point to also serve certain communities that aren’t otherwise represented visually. For example, India Currents has done a lot of wonderful visual journalism representing the South Asian population in the Bay Area and California. Black Voice News has been around for over 50 years, but has never had a visual journalist on staff — their community was not being represented visually either.
WF: In particular, how does visual journalism help build representation and trust, when compared to other forms of media?
EMS: It’s not just the fact that these images represent realities that people can realize. That’s the end product, that’s what they see on their screen or in print. That definitely helps. But it’s also the role of the visual journalists themselves. Meaning, the visual journalist is the one who goes out into the community, because they can’t do any reporting from their desk. So, when you’re talking about communities like Riverside or Salinas, the visual journalists are everywhere — at the football game, city hall, and school board meetings. They get to know the community.
It’s more than just having the images represent the community — it’s the visual journalist acting as a trusted messenger. When you think about the act of photography itself, when done right and collaboratively with the community, it is a deep act of trust. Someone chooses to sit in front of a camera and places trust in the visual journalist that they will be represented in the right way. There are parts of visual journalism that can be extractive, like going into a town after a crisis occurs, and taking a bunch of pictures and sending those back out and not necessarily spending time with a community. But if you think about the role of a visual journalist in a community, especially if they live in that community, it’s a really deep relationship and one that can and should build trust in the outlet.
Recently, Hiram Durán, one of the visual journalists we placed at El Tímpano, did a wonderful project with the community. He took portraits of people at the Coliseum Swap Meet in East Oakland, a popular open air market known as La Pulga. He also gave the portraits directly to the community members as part of community building and representation. That also helps audience growth, because people signed up for El Tímpano text updates, too. At its core, visual journalism is very much a trust-building exercise.
WF: What else do you envision CatchLight doing to help local newsrooms in the future?
EMS: We’ve found that refining our workflows is going to be really important. If we start increasing visual capacity, we need to make sure newsrooms can store and archive images in a way that they can be reused — that way, the investment in visual journalism will have a much higher return. We’re working on creating a central repository for images, so from there, it’s a lot easier to share content with each other and more newsrooms can have access.
While photography may be the easiest aspect of visual journalism to start with, we are also looking to expand our services into video and data journalism. We’re also hosting a visual storytelling summit on April 27 in San Francisco. To define future sustainability, it is absolutely key to gather leaders in the fields of visual storytelling, media, and technology to create bridges and connections. Convening has been a central part of our strategy from the beginning.
Will Fischer is a journalist covering the intersection of technology and media. He’s worked for Business Insider and New York magazine and conducted local news research for City Bureau. Follow Will on Twitter @willfisch15 or email him at willfisch15@gmail.com.
About the Center for Cooperative Media: The Center is a primarily grant-funded program of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. Its mission is to grow and strengthen local journalism and support an informed society in New Jersey and beyond. The Center is supported with funding from Montclair State University, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Democracy Fund, the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium, the Independence Public Media Foundation, Rita Allen Foundation, Inasmuch Foundation and John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. For more information, visit centerforcooperativemedia.org.
