by CARMEN SIERING
Jeremy Hogan is best known as a photographer for The Herald-Times, where he worked for nearly 22 years. Now the editor and publisher of the online news site The Bloomingtonian, Hogan is also a contributor to Getty Images. He’s won awards for his work covering everything from national politics to natural disasters, but according to him, it’s a wonder he’s a photographer at all.
“All things considered, I shouldn’t even be doing this,” he says. “I don’t come from a long line of college-educated people.”
Hogan hails from California’s Central Valley, in a county he describes as one of the state’s poorest. “My grandparents were all migrant farmworkers in the 1950s and ’60s,” he says.
Hogan describes himself as a curious kid and a voracious reader who happened to pick up a book on photojournalism. “I had an interest because my dad [a veteran of two tours in Vietnam] had photos from the war,” he says. “I knew there was a really different world out there, and I thought photojournalism looked great. I could travel and see the world and get paid for it.”
His mother saved for a year to buy him his first good camera, and Hogan began taking photos for his high school paper. He got his chance to work for the local newspaper when another photographer’s camera broke at an important wrestling tournament. Hogan was there and got the shot. His photo and photo credit ran in The Porterville Recorder the next day.
After high school, Hogan began taking classes at the local junior college, then transferred to San Jose State University to study photojournalism. Graduating in May 1997, he was in Ann Arbor, Michigan, working on a post-graduation internship when he heard about a full-time job at The H-T. He worked there until January 2019, when he was let go without much warning.
The next month, Hogan and his wife, Toni Arcuri, started The Bloomingtonian, an online visual journalism service covering Bloomington and the surrounding area, available through its website, on social media, and via Patreon.
“I’ve learned that even if corporations don’t value local news, people do, especially in a town like this,” Hogan says.
He hopes those same people will support The Bloomingtonian, which needs more subscribers. “If we don’t get more, we aren’t going to be able to keep publishing,” he says.
Follow The Bloomingtonian on Facebook and Twitter, or at bloomingtonian.com. To subscribe, visit patreon.com/bloomingtonian.
