A tale of woe - PR chickies gone wild

If you want to zing her a little bit, you can say you are really glad that she pointed out the photo altering because that is against the paper's policy and people have been fired for running doctored photos.

So her email was extremely helpful, thank you, etc. etc.

 

great thread title. i was expecting something a little saucier though.

 

this is a symptom of so many magazines and advertorial that allow the subject to determine their photo.
I don't think, in this case, the PR person is being prickish.
Merely clueless.
I agree with SF and Ace to politely respond and let her know you don't operate that way.
I used to pull my hair out at my old place because our ad reps, when selling special sections, would pretty much guarantee advertisers that their particular angle or whatever would either be mentioned or worse, be a story.
I'm proud to say that there were many contra ads put in the paper because I refused to go along and, when feeling particularly passive aggressive, would purposely omit any references even if they were valid.
I hate ad people more than PR people

 

hey Jay, if the photographer is going to do that you should ask him to wait until the photos are published before offering the subjects his freelance services ... that way this won't happen again and there's less conflict of interest.

 

As much as I want to blame the photog - my hate of all things photographic burns bright - I don't think he did anything wrong.
In a normal session he'll shoot maybe 100 images, then he'll cull that down (eight this time) and then I pick three, then the layout person uses one, maybe two.
In this case what he did was send the other 92 to the PR person to see if they would like to purchase them for their own marketing purposes. That's between him and the marketing person.
As previously noted if he can make a little extra cash, that's cool.
I think the marketing person misunderstood and assumed that what she saw would be the pictures that would run in print and that she had a choice.
Why she took the extra step of playing with photoshop or, more likely, had an underling play with photoshop is beyond me.
But thank God for SportsJournalists.com. My first reaction was WTF? Then I wanted to fire off an e-mail that was neither polite or professional.
This place allowed me to vent, rather quickly, and I was able to avoid a phone call from the boss wanting to know what I called a PR chickie a "stupid f***ing whore."

 

If someone somehow got the message - mistaken or not - that they could pay for your content I would at the least make the photog wait until the damn thing is published before he tries to make some money on the side so that it doesn't happen again.

 

>>>I would at the least make the photog wait until the damn thing is published before he tries to make some money on the side so that it doesn't happen again.<<<

gotta make this policy

 

Wow.
Tell PR chickie to call the Toledo Blade for advice on how to doctor photos and not get away with it.

 

So what was her reaction?

 

I think we tend to overreact a little in situations like this because of the ethical guidelines we follow every day.

But whether right or wrong, a large portion of people outside of this business wouldn't give a second thought about doctoring a photo -- if the intent is to make the photo better -- for a publication. Especially when it's something like this -- a feature story and a portrait photo.

They honest to God believe they're being helpful and that asking you to run a particular is just a small favor.

Do like some others have suggested and politely inform her of the policies regarding photo usage and running photoshopped images. There's no reason to be nasty and it will prevent this girl from making the same mistake later with you or someone else.

 

What he said. No reason to be nasty about it, just explain it to her and go from there.