You are:  In charge of marketing for a corporation. Organizing an event. Planning a wedding. Starting a blog.

You want: Beautiful, memorable photos.  Images that will grab the viewer’s attention, and hold it. A new head shot. A creative Christmas card.

You need: A photojournalist with daily newspaper experience.

Here’s why:

1. Photojournalists don’t make excuses — Things do go wrong, but a photojournalist who has worked for a daily newspaper is trained to do superior work, and quickly. She cannot come back to the office with no photo. The paper is coming out tomorrow, a photo is needed. She is used to operating under pressure.

2. Versatility — What I love about newspaper photographers is that they can do anything. My P-I colleagues often found themselves shooting a natural disaster one day (they all own rubber boots), a concert for the arts section the next day, and then a cake  for the food section the next.

3. Consider your moment captured — How much would you pay to make sure that THE moment of your event is captured forever? This is what photojournalists are trained to do every day. At my own wedding, I knew that I didn’t have to worry about making sure our photographer (and friend) was capturing crucial moments. He was everywhere. When I saw the photos, I was delighted and saw new aspects of my own wedding that I had missed.

4. Photo journalists are problem solvers – Tell me, how do you make a photo of a technology company interesting? As a business reporter for nearly five years, I got to profile some really cool companies — but a lot of times, these companies performed a service that just wasn’t visually interesting. But I rarely worried about this — I knew we’d have a publishable photo for the newspaper because the photographer would think of something I never could have.

5. They’re the best of the best — Newspaper journalism is cutthroat. Thousands of people want to shoot photos for newspapers, particularly in a big city like Seattle. However, just a dozen actually get to do it.  In short, they’ve been vetted.

Following are links to three Seattle-based photojournalists and companies whose work I can vouch for, and that I respect:

1. Stuart Isett — New York Times photographer, freelancer. He also shot my wedding. (Link to his Web page.)

2. Red Box Pictures — Seattle photography studio business started by former Seattle P-I photographers. (Link to company Web page.)

3. Marcus Donner — Newspaper photographer formerly with the King County Journal. He also teaches an excellent class for amateurs — to really help you get the most out of your point-and-shoot, or higher end camera. (Link to his Web site.)

Why did I write this post?

Newspaper photojournalists are best-kept secrets in terms of professionals-for-hire. They often let their photos speak for themselves, but I wanted to give some other concrete reasons beyond pointing out that they take good photos.

I did not get any money or anything from listing the above photographers. Stuart shot my wedding in 2008 and we paid full price, as any professional deserves.

Also, I’d recently read this story about a U.K. couple whose wedding photos were abysmal, and they sued the photographer. It occurred to me while reading it that I never had any such worries. Because I hired a photojournalist.

And finally, all three photos at the top of my home page index were shot by photojournalists. Their names are at the bottom of the page.

Do you ever think about how much of our lives are in “the cloud?”

Students at my college were big users of AOL Instant Messenger (oh so 2000!), and we religiously updated our away messages. “I’m sleeping.” “I’m writing a paper.” “Sexiled.” (Remember that one?)

After Sept. 11, 2001, during which I was in D.C., I began thinking a lot about my own mortality. For the first time, I realized that I could die unexpectedly. I would think, what if I died from a bomb on the Metro? And the next immediate thought was, “Who would update my away message?”

In 2007, I’d said on Poynter that journalists should be users of social media. (This is back when journalists were actually debating it. Now, it’s a given.) If we are to report on the world we live in, then we have to fully live in it.

But what happens when there’s a technical glitch?

My Facebook profile has been inaccessible for two days.  The company is having some sort of problem, according to this message board thread. And people are getting upset.

One frantic user writes, “OMG!!!! I’m about to lose it…. My birthday is coming and I don’t want to miss my birthday wishes. This is really annoying!!! I’ve been waiting for 5 long and awful days….This is a serious issue. No one seems to care.”

I don’t know this user’s age, but I found her comment adorable and completely honest. Before you judge her, consider this: People communicate now via social mediums, some people exclusively so.

And when the medium goes down, we lose our social.

Spare me talk about the old fashioned way of communicating — face to face and via phone — and how it’s so much better. No it’s not.  And if you think this way, you probably leave too many voicemails. (Voicemail is dead.)

In the capstone thesis class during my senior year of college, one student wrote her paper on social technology, concluding that technology only enhances the social qualities that we already have — thus, social people are even more social online.

To me, it is not an insult to wish someone happy birthday via text message. Go a few years younger than me (I’m 28) and the communication methods are even more drastically different. True story: My college-age younger brother’s home burned down last month. I learned about this via his Facebook status update.

I then communicated the news to another family member via e-mail, who then responded to me the next day via text: “WHY DIDN’T ANYONE CALL ME?” (This 40-something family member only texts in capital letters. We love him. He tries.)

Another example: My birthday this year happened to coincide with my first day as a non-journalist. It was mostly a lonely day of packing for my next adventure, interrupted only by jaunts over to my open laptop to read my birthday messages from all my friends. So great!

The day that I expected to be filled with the radio silence of losing my public voice was instead filled with dozens of messages.  I was no longer a working reporter, but I still had friends. And those friends chose to share via Facebook.

I wouldn’t have it any other way, especially after having moved to a new city six times in the past 10 years. Keeping in touch is so easy, thanks to the social media that have become my lifeline.

There is just one upside to the fact that my Facebook profile is down: It freed me up long enough to write this blog post.