Shareen Strauss － The last bastion of Siskiyou County Photo-Journalism
I find it ironic that now I’m writing about Shareen. Back in 2020 when I was just starting out my photography, Messing with lightroom and watching tutorials. Then head of the Dunsmuir Chamber of Commerce Dylan Lennan reached out to me. He said that my talent would be useful for the Chamber. He had a higher-paying job opportunity though. And being the head of the Chamber Isn’t easy. Before he left to live his dreams of being the manager of the nearest Applebee’s he referred me to Shareen; saying that it would be good to see a real photographer at work. The next Second Saturday arrives. During this week between when he referred me and Second Saturday a great friend gave me my first camera. Not all that amazing. A cannon 100d. but definitely a major improvement from my iPhone 8+! When Second Saturday came, during golden hour. I found her taking photos of the event in the art museum. She then pretty sporadically started interviewing me after we checked each other's gear out. And wrote an article about me at the Mount Shasta Harald.
Shareen had been working there for quite some time. And even then was basically the sole journalist for the local newspaper in Southern Siskiyou County. I cannot find exact sources but Shareen said to me awhile after our first meetup that she was, along with many other employees of the Mount Shasta Harald laid off. Then shortly after the newspaper basically dissolved into just being another webpage with only semi-local news from the USA Today network. Basically they kinda just disappeared and without Shareen, there would be no more of the hyperlocal news we had come to expect.
Not too long ago when I stumbled across her at the Dunsmuir Steampunk Festival she told me about this new local newspaper she was working on with the creator, and some other folks. I was astonished by how beautiful and effective the user interface was. I said, “It is the nicest-looking news website I’ve ever seen in my entire life!” But that didn't last for very long…
On one fateful day, I was trying to log into my account and I noticed that the website looked totally different. I said, “It went from 100 to 0.” From what once was a beautiful budding news site went to looking just as generic as the previous local newspaper. The soul of it was stripped away, and for what? The publisher answered my question. Quote: “It’s a completely different platform and software. All independently hosted and encrypted for security.” He also said: “Out of hundreds of users they love the readability and how this loads much better, it does so much more on the backside also. Was not a fan of the large bulky posts and was hard to find other articles sometimes. Yes, Wix is a pain in the rear and crashed a lot. Was not ready to work with photos and I had to use third party sources to host music or audio files to add to articles.”
Before
After
But I really feel this is a pretty lame response. It took many tries for him to answer my question with a proper response. Yes, readability is very important for any website and especially news websites. but that's the thing; It's a news website, not a printed newspaper. It sucks that he totally ripped away the style of it and I honestly think that it was more readable before. They became the thing very they fought to destroy. As one of my teachers puts it: “Different strokes for different folks.”
Despite all of this, Shareen truly is the last bastion of local news for this area. I really enjoy reading her stories. I hope that they can get the website looking better, and functioning better. And I’d love a response from the publisher and maybe we can discuss ways to make it better.
