It’s amazing how many people in the art world are named Art…or maybe it’s just me. One of my first jobs in journalism was at a major daily newspaper. I was completely green, still in college, inexperienced, knew next to nothing about the industry, and in my early 20s.
My first week there was as most first weeks are at a new job: overwhelming and spent trying to remember names and make a good first impression, learn everything you can, and remember everything you can, and then learn about completely new concepts, some of which seemed to make no sense. And then there are those odd ball situations, occurrences, ironies, you notice that seem that they are only there to mess with you, since you are new.
One of the first things I learned in the newsroom that first week was about was the concept of “wild art.” This refers to artwork (a photo) that appears in a newspaper that’s not part of an article but stands on its own in an illustrative way—to give the reader a sense of what is going on in the area, that day, and what people are doing when they are out and about with respect to the weather, the area, or the time of year.
For example, on a hot, sunny summer day, on his or her way to shoot a homicide, a photojournalist might run across some kids playing with a water hose in the middle of the street, spraying each other, laughing and screaming, and the photog will hop out of the car and capture the moment. The accompanying caption might read something along the lines of “Little ones keep cool as temperatures soar….” Wild art is artistic, clever, fun and above all, this is the light news—a break from all of the heavy stuff on the front page.
Back to one of the first things I learned that day (the odd ball situation, I mentioned, there to mess with me) was that one of the guys in the layout and design dept was named Art Wild.
—SBM
Single Busy Mommy 