Kramer named managing editor

Hello to the readers of the Press Times:

My name is Daniel Kramer, and I have accepted the position of managing editor.

I was born in Green Bay and graduated from Southwest High School.

I then attended the University of Minnesota where I played rugby, worked as a freelance reporter and photographer for The Minnesota Daily and completed a sports writing internship with the Star-Tribune newspaper.

After receiving my bachelor’s degree in journalism, I accepted the sports editor position at a small newspaper in Sturgis, S.D where I stayed less than a year before accepting the sports editor job at The Record-Gazette in Banning, CA.

In those days, I did it all.

I rolled the bulk film into the film canisters, photographed sports, feature stories and portraits and also gave our photographers their assignments.

I developed the film, printed the negatives, wrote sports and feature articles and laid out the pages.
After two years in Banning, I was accepted into the Masters program for documentary photojournalism at the Academy of Art in San Francisco.

Toward the end of my studies, I was selected to the Eddie Adams Workshop in upstate New York as one of the top 100 college photographers in the country and completed an internship with Newsday.

Shortly after the Eddie Adams Workshop, I received a $50,000 film and processing grant from ShopKo and embarked on a self-financed project in which I retraced Mark Twain’s journey around the world on the 100th anniversary of his epic trip.

In all, that project took me through 11 countries in 10 months and was self-financed with 10 credit cards.
Highlights from that project included photographing Mother Teresa, South African President Nelson Mandela and Queen Elizabeth II.

When I returned from that trip, I called family friend and sports reporter Dick Schaap and pitched the idea of photographing Bart Starr with Brett Favre.

Dick turned my idea into the book, “Green Bay Replay,” and I photographed the entire season including the Super Bowl victory in New Orleans.

After that project concluded, I traveled to Cuba to photograph Pope John Paul’s historic visit.

I fell in love with the country and decided to do another self-financed, long-term, documentary photography project.

Over the course of three years, I spent a total of six months traveling and photographing the cities, the countryside, the people and industries of the land that time forgot.

After seven years of working as a freelance photographer, I accepted the staff photographer position at the Houston Press.

During my time with the Press, I had my own photo column, won numerous awards and saw my first photograph acquired by a major museum.

In 2008, I began teaching photography classes at Rice University.

I continued teaching classes there until COVID-19 stopped in-class teaching in 2020.

In 2016, I successfully completed a Kickstarter campaign which funded a revisiting of my photographs of the Packers from that 1996-97 Super Bowl-winning season and allowed me to self-publish the coffee-table photography book “Return to Glory,” which included remembrances Mike Holmgren, Ron Wolf, LeRoy Butler as well as Bart Starr, Paul Hornung and my dad, Jerry Kramer.

Over the course of my career, my photographs have appeared in TIME, Newsweek, The Atlantic, VICE, Paris Match and have been featured on CNN, NBC News, ABC News, PBS Newshour and have been collected by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Phoenix Art Museum, The Fort Wayne Museum of Art and The Ramones Museum in Berlin.

And so now my path brings me full circle: back to Green Bay and back to writing, editing and photographing.

I’m excited at this opportunity to get to know my hometown again.

So much has changed since I last lived here.

I grew up on the West Side, and I just learned that Bellevue means Beautiful View in French.

There’s so much to learn and discover.

And I’m happy to be in the newsroom again.

It’s wonderful to collaborate with your co-workers and put out a newspaper.

I’m looking forward to exploring, learning, sharing and hearing from you all.

It’s great to be back!