Jeff Seidel
Writer | Detroit Free Press

Seidel, 37, joined the Detroit Free Press in 1998 as a general assignment features reporter. He has covered everything from the Super Bowl to the war in Iraq

His specialty is writing stories about everyday people facing extraordinary circumstances. He has won several state and national awards, including the 2002 Delta Sigma Chi award for feature writing from the Society of Professional Journalists.

Seidel covered the war in Iraq for Knight-Ridder Newspapers, as an embedded journalist with the Marines. Paired with a sketch artist, Seidel wrote features focusing on individual soldiers and civilians. The series was named a feature of the year by Editor & Publisher magazine. It also won the 2004 National Headliner Award for feature writing.

Seidel has written several serial narratives at the Free Press. He spent 10 months in a classroom, chronicling the first year of an inner-city schoolteacher. And he spent eight months in a fire station, writing about the firefighters and EMS workers after Sept. 11.

Seidel was a three-time finalist for the Livingston Award and was on a team that won an Associated Press Sports Editors award for investigative reporting after uncovering the academic fraud scandal in the University of Minnesota men’s basketball program.

Before joining the Free Press, Seidel was a sports writer for 10 years. He wrote for the Grand Rapids (Mich.) Press from 1989-97 and then covered the Minnesota Vikings for two seasons (1997-98) at the St. Paul (Minn.) Pioneer Press.

Seidel is a graduate of Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan. He is married and has three children.

Eric Seals
Photographer | Detroit Free Press

“If you learn to shoot with your heart, you’ll move peoples souls.” That phrase of inspiration, said to him in 1993 by one of his mentors at the Detroit Free Press is something photojournalist, Eric Seals thinks about on a daily basis when making pictures.

Born in Detroit into a news junkie family in 1969, Seals knew in 10th grade that he wanted to be a photojournalist. Seals grew up reading the Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press and became more interested in looking at the pictures in the Detroit Free Press because the photographers seemed to make something out of nothing assignments and took more chances.

Seals graduated from the University of Missouri-School of Journalism after doing an internship at the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel in 1992 and the Louisville Courier-Journal in 1993. In that same year he did a one-year internship at the Detroit Free Press before heading for an internship and job opportunity at The State Newspaper in Columbia, SC. In 1995 Seals won the South Carolina Photographer of the Year and in 1999 joined the staff of the Detroit Free Press.

Seals covered the Presidential campaigns of both Bill Clinton and George W Bush; the Northridge, California earthquake in 1993; wildfires in Florida in 1997; several hurricanes in North and South Carolina; the historical entrance of the first woman into The Citadel in 1997; the ongoing violence in Israel/Palestine in 2000 and 2002 and the recent the war on Iraq.

Seals recently won the 2004 Michigan Press Photographers Association Barry Edmonds Understanding Award and the 2005 Dart Award for Excellence in Reporting on Victims of Violence for a 6-part series in the Detroit Free Press called “Homicide in Detroit: Echoes of Violence.” He has been a member of the faculty at Truth with a Camera Workshop in Portsmouth, VA. Taught at the 2003 Visual Edge workshop at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, FL and at the West Virginia University School of Journalism. Seals loves to mentor others who are interested in this great profession.

He is married to Rhonda Seals has an adorable 5-year-old son named Ayrton and 9-month-old girl named Anna.