Poynter: “Ann Hermes knew her work as a photojournalist would take her to exotic places. And it has — to discover the food markets of Jerusalem, to see hammocks in Honduras and to witness the Arab Spring in Egypt. But the work that’s closer to home reveals something Hermes is skilled at seeking out. It might look like nostalgia, that’s there for sure, but Hermes is really capturing something else — people and places on the brink of change. She photographed the last Morse code station in the United States, a JCPenney Portrait Studio, and, for several years now, small local newspaper newsrooms. The idea first started percolating around 2016, as we all got painfully familiar with the term “fake news” and claims that journalists were all elitists. “And for me, it was like, have you been in a local newsroom?” Hermes said. “At the local level, that couldn’t be further from the truth.” The photographer, who worked at Christian Science Monitor, started her career in local newsrooms at the Northwest Arkansas Times in Fayetteville and The Eagle-Tribune on the outskirts of Boston. Her idea for documenting local newspapers grew while visiting family in southern Illinois. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch was too thin, her family complained. “And I walked into the newsroom for the first time, and I saw a sea of empty carpet with the outline of where the desks had been,” Hermes said. She thought: “If I could show my family this scene, they would understand what they’re seeing in the newspaper.” Hermes has visited more than 50 local newspapers since starting her project, which was highlighted last week in The New Yorker. She ruled out metro newspapers pretty quickly because of the response from corporate, and has mostly focused on family-owned papers, with a few online newsrooms in the project, too. She uses news desert reports from Medill and the University of North Carolina to find the spots she should visit. And the locally-owned places welcome her. “I did not have to explain what I was doing to them,” Hermes said. “They immediately opened up their doors.” In the newsrooms she’s photographed, Hermes often sees familiar echoes: a police scanner, maps, newspaper morgues that no one has had time to digitize yet, tucked away in corners or basements. There’s often a stapler and the place where it belongs — editorial, photo desk, advertising — written and affixed on it in big bold letters. People who read The New Yorker, and for sure people who read Poynter, will not be surprised by what they see. But Hermes doesn’t just mean for her project to be one about nostalgia. “The communities that really need to see this work are the communities that haven’t thought about their local paper in a long time and what it would mean to lose their local paper,” she said. She’d like to work with local institutions, maybe libraries, to display her images in the places where they were made and spark discussions about the newspapers and what they’re facing. “This is for me a love letter to journalism,” Hermes said. “But I do want it to do more than that.”