Picture - When readers attack

I wish we could see how it ran. If it screamed 'Man in Pain! Buy this Paper!' you're going to look exploitive. If it's just another piece of art on the front page, that's good journalism and you're doing what good newspapers do...you're telling a story.

 

I've thought about putting a pdf up here but then I'd be outing myself a little more.

 

Understood--don't do it. Just trying to envision how it ran.

 

I'll measure it out here in a bit.

 

We had a situation this year where two children were playing with guns while the parents were gone. One shot the other with a shotgun, killed him.

We had a picture of the kid who did the shooting crying and hugging his dad. We caught a ton of shit for it, but it was a great photo.

Some woman caught me at an event one night and started bitching at me about the photo. She said she was there and saw the photographer taking the photo. "So, it was OK for you to stand out and watch it and intrude on their privacy, but it wasn't OK for us to take the photo," I said. She didn't have an answer.

 

What a great comeback.

 

Actually, the last photo of the the buzzard hovering over the boy is misleading. That photo was cropped. What you don't see on the other side of the bird is a bunch of his friends feeding on a dead animal.

The photo is still heartbreaking and makes a bold statement. But it is misleading

 

You can't really see WHO that person is at the cop's feet either.

 

The father's reaction is not newsworthy.

Not in the least.

And, again, if that had been a buck-naked woman being consoled by the cop, does that photo run?

Would her being naked be what you consider offensive enough to the readers to not run it?

 

Newsworthy is a word, I think, that fails to cover all the reasons why we publish what we do. I can find much in our paper that falls short of that litmus test, yet we run it.

Someone said something earlier about what people need to know or see. There is almost nothing in a newspaper, in the strictest sense of the word, that people need.

 

It's a sad, short story.

Certainly not the 50,000 words that that photo contains.

 

It's hard to parse exactly what the story is and what's not. At first take, this story is about a kid getting hit by a school bus. Also on first take - and this might be too grand an example - the events of September 11, 2001 were two planes crashing into very tall buildings.
But those weren't the only photos that ran of that. There was the aftermath, and papers did run photos of firemen working through horrible emotions. This photo here also depicts the aftermath, which as it's been said, is a reality of the event whether you like it or not.
This isn't a perfect parallel, given the massive scope and impact of 9/11, but it becomes a lot closer when you put both situations in a vacuum. (And I do recognize that if all news decisions were made in a vacuum, many of them would suck). But it's just something to think about.