Matt Mendelsohn, Phase 3

What does a former newspaper photographer and photo editor do after leaving the world of newspapers?

Shoot really great wedding photos as your bread and butter. Do some side projects that are close to your heart. And take up writing.

Matt Mendelsohn -- post-USA Today magazine, post-UPI, post-daily-newspaper and post-college-newspaper where Daughter Number Three first met him long ago -- has written and photographed a remarkable article about a young woman named Lindsay Ess.

It was published on a site called sportshooter.com, then picked up today by BoingBoing. And gee, I was just thinking of Matt yesterday. Good to see he's keeping busy with something worthwhile in his corner of the newspaper diaspora.

I gather the story was turned down by the Washington Post because it focuses on someone with a disability, and they had just recently had a story on someone with a different disability, so their unspoken "quota" had been used up. Or maybe it was just too negative. As one commenter on BoingBoing put it,

Like the fact that the best news come from the "fake" Daily Show, I find it somewhat ironic that we have to turn to sportsshooter.com -- a site for sports photographers to share tips -- to publish this.

I'll be sure to continue to turn to the mainstream media though, when I want stories and pictures of a basket of puppies.

Also see the Q&A with Mendelsohn about how he met Lindsay and her family, and came to release the story on the Web instead of a print publication.