Journalism 207, a series of online Zoom training sessions for high school students, is an initiative involving journalists from the Portland Press Herald, Morning Sentinel, Kennebec Journal and Sun Journal who lend expert advice and experience to students interested in pursuing a career in journalism.
Our next session on Monday, May 2 at 3 p.m. will cover how to take good photos with just a phone, led by staff photographers Gregory Rec and Brianna Soukup of the Portland Press Herald. The session will be moderated by Press Herald web editor Katherine Lee. Each photographer will talk about their own experiences in shooting photos, and we will finish with a question-and-answer period for the students.
Greg got his start in journalism delivering his hometown newspaper, the Norwich Bulletin, as a teenager, reading the front page articles on dark winter mornings as he passed under streetlights. Greg worked as a photojournalist at a weekly newspaper group in Connecticut for three years before attending the University of Montana to study journalism and Spanish. He interned at the Portland Press Herald in the summer of 1995 and the Boston Globe the following year.
He was hired at the Press Herald in 1997 and over the past 20 years, he has photographed throughout Maine, covered the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in New York City, twice embedded with Maine Army National Guard troops in Iraq, covered the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana and the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.
In 2004, Rec was named Journalist of the Year with columnist Bill Nemitz by the Maine Press Association for their work in Iraq. After only ten years at the Press Herald, he won the Master Photographer award from the New England Society of Newspaper Editors, an award usually reserved for veteran photographers.
Brianna was born and raised in Nebraska and became interested in photography in elementary school when her art teacher gave her a camera to document their fifth grade class. After college she interned at the Palm Beach Post in West Palm Beach, Florida and the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, VA.
She was hired by the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram in 2016 and moved to Maine where she quickly fell in love with photographing the people and places in our beautiful state.
She’s been awarded by the Hearst Journalism Awards Program, Society of Professional Journalists and in 2020 received the MacGregor Fiske Award for early-career journalists in New England.
Katherine Lee has been the web editor at the Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram for five years, and was previously the city editor for five years. She has worked at the Tampa Bay Times and the Tuscaloosa (Ala.) News, where she led the newsroom to a Pulitzer Prize in Breaking News in 2012. She is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, where she received her BA and MJ degrees. She and her husband live in South Portland.
Watch our previous Journalism 207 session on How To Find a Good Story here:
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