Paul Barker Email & Phone Number

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Singapore, Singapore

In this position I was responsible for hiring, managing and assigning a team of 30 staff photographers and dozens of contractors - both full time and part time - to cover the various news and sport stories in Asia on a daily basis. My area of responsibility - Asia - included Mongolia and China in the north to Australia and New Zealand in the south, Afghanistan and Pakistan in the west and Japan and Korea in the east and all countries in between.In this position I was responsible for winning all of the major stories of the day in Asia by beating our competition (AP, AFP and GETTY) in terms of photo quality, skill and speed. At the same time I was responsible for the safety of our team who often operated in difficult circumstances. I managed a tight budget in an unpredictable climate and became adept at navigating various levels of bureaucracy within the company.

Singapore, Singapore

I brought all regional Reuters news picture desks, including Washington and London, into Singapore and was responsible for editing Reuters global news picture file in 24/7 operation. I hired, trained and lead a staff of 60+ people, the majority of them from Singapore, Malaysia and India. Most of these new hires had little to no experience in either journalism or photography but within a year were handling hundreds if not thousands of political, sport, conflict and feature images a day, checking each of them for quality, integrity, fairness and accuracy in order to meet Reuters high standards before being quickly sent to our global clients around the world.

Singapore, Singapore

Editing news pictures submitted by photographers from around Asia and sending to our global clients over the wire. My duties at this time included quality control of photos, checking the accuracy of both the image and the caption, requesting different angles of certain images to more adequately tell the story, all done at a high pace in order to get our images to the clients before the opposition.

Seoul, South Korea

News photographer for an international wire agency which sold news images, video and text stories to print, online and TV clients around the world. While based in Seoul, Korea for Reuters as a staff photographer I had the opportunity to travel frequently to cover the biggest breaking news stories in Asia at that time.