Picture - When readers attack

The US National Guard killing US citizens is bigger news than a kid getting killed in a traffic accident. If I'm the editor, the Kent State photo runs huge. The grieving father shot runs, but not huge.

 

The kid was killed by a school bus, which makes it different from a "traffic accident," though I don't know the details.

 

I don't know the details, either. OK, "traffic accident" isn't a good characterization. Motor vehicle accident, then. And an unusual and tragic one at that. Still, it's local news. Kent State was world news.

 

This photo isn't likely to run elsewhere, so I'm not sure I understand the characterization of local news versus world news.

 

We ran into a similar situation with a mall shooting in this town


As expected, plenty of letters to the editor came flying in.

 

That's an incredible photo Ides. Wow!

 

The readers complained that it exploited an already hurting family. My thought is the family was already as hurt as they could get, but a photo like that is just too powerful considering the gunman wasn't dead at that point as far as anyone knew.

the paper's policy is usually to not run photos of dead people, especially local dead people. In this case, though, the rule was ignored -- rightfully so. We ran plenty of photos of people hugging and crying in the parking lot, too. But the cop standing guard over one of the shooting victims is too strong to not run. And we ran it big.

the photog got lucky to get the photo because they were understandably not allowing anyone into the mall, he found an angle through an exterior window and got this image which was picked up by virtually every media outlet running the story.

 

Well, editorial priorities are different depending on whether it's a big-city daily or a small one.

The more I think about this matter, the more I realize I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. I've never had any academic journalistic training...my degree is in English and I got into this field more or less by accident. In my years as a journalist, I've done sports and I've done environmental/agricultural news. Never worked a beat that would have dead kids or mall shootings as part of my repsonsibilities. Thank God.

Still, there might be some value to my reaction, since my lack of experience in this regard makes me more of a reader than an industry insider. So before I STFU, I'll just mention that as a reader, I do find something vaguely exploitive and invasive about blowing up the grieving father shot to where it dominates a page. I'd appreciate someone who knows more about this to explain to me why it would be necessary to make that photo huge.

I'd also appreciate someone who knows more about this subject to explain where responsible reportage of violent tragedy stops and where "if it bleeds, it leads" sensationalism begins. People outside journalism ask me about this frequently and I haven't been able to give them a satisfactory answer.

 

We ran it on the front of the section, obviously. And it was big, but it wasn't done distastefully. At one of my old shops we ran a picture of two medics bringing out a body bag of a little girl who ran off from her mother and then was killed by an alligator.

Compelling stuff. Heartbreaking yes. But compelling.

And Idaho, that has to be the recent mall shooting right?

 

As emotional a shot as you can get. Great job.

 

Is there a link to the story/photo?

 

it makes my skin crawl to think of these people complaining about how awful these photos are.

yes, they are horrible.

but what happened is called reality. it's tragic, but it's reality. unfortunately, sometimes it's awful. tragic stuff happens every day.

readers should be grateful their local photogs are talented, dedicated and savvy enough to be on hand to capture these moments that make us all go home and hug our kids while thinking about how life is fleeting.