As I have traveled the world during the past ten years training journalists and working with newspaper publishers, I have documented each country's love of newspapers by making candid photographs of the public selling and using newspapers.

In each country, I use those photos to help journalists and newspaper managers understand who their readers are.  Every journalist likes to believe that it is the "elite", the "intelligentsia", the "powerful, well-educated" who read his work.  Certainly , those people do read.  But in the countries of the former Soviet regime and in third-world places struggling for democracy and economic survival, there are other people who are far more important to the future -- the ordinary, average citizens.

I used to say the photos were of people "reading" their newspapers ... but it quickly became clear that the value of newspapers in most of the world goes far beyond just getting the news.

But THIS was a first for me! 

My collection includes people reading (or "using") their newspapers in dozens of remote countries.  It includes houses with newspaper curtains in Kazakhstan, people wearing newspaper hats in Uzbekistan, picnic table cloths of newspaper in China.  But never before --

Newspaper-as-live-chicken-carrying-case !