Today in visual journalism: 'Dive bar stock photo'

Quick, what's the best way to get a little free publicity for your website? Make a list of "the NN most RR in ZZ" and wait for some news director to say "Hey, we made the list!"

Leave aside the obvious -- how the judging is done, and whether something called impulcity.com is going to have the same operational definition of "dive" that you or Raymond Chandler or the Bottle Rockets might have. Gaze upon the cutline:

"Dive bar stock photo."

And as 2014 draws to a close, the best a news operation can do to illustrate a PR person's idea of a dive bar is a filer of somebody else's idea of a dive bar. Divewise, these are trying times.

Stamp out 'celebrates'

Now that Christmas hasn't come early, can New Year's resolutions be far behind? Here's one you can practice on for the Super Bowl! No, it's not the idea of running nothing but columns on your front page (check it out: four stories, four photo logos). It's the cutline with the obligatory NFL story:

Detroit Lions safety James Ihedigbo celebrates the tackle on the Chicago Bears’ Matt Forte during first-half action on Sunday at Soldier Field in Chicago. The Lions won, 20-14, but it wasn’t pretty. Next week, they try to break a 23-year road losing streak in the state of Wisconsin. 

And the two on 6A:

Detroit Lions fans celebrate against the Chicago Bears on Sunday at Soldier Field in Chicago. But it was galling how the Lions’ self-inflicted mistakes kept an awful Bears team close, especially during the first half, when Detroit committed three turnovers. Matthew Stafford threw two interceptions, and a muffed punt gave the Bears hope.

Detroit* Lions receiver Golden Tate celebrates a first down during first-half action Sunday. The Lions’ 20-14 victory followed their trusted formula all season — plenty of luck and plenty of guts. 

And the versions in Miami and Charlotte, which at least put the story inside:

The Dolphins’ Terrence Fede, middle, celebrates after blocking a punt in the final seconds of Sunday’s game for a safety that helped Miami beat Minnesota, 37-35, at Sun Life Stadium. Despite officially being eliminated from playoff contention, team owner Stephen Ross said Joe Philbin would return in 2015 as Miami’s head coach.Story, 1D.

The Panthers’ Jonathan Stewart (28) celebrates his go-ahead touchdown catch with Cam Newton against Cleveland during the fourth quarter Sunday. Carolina (6-8-1) will play a winner-take-all game against the Falcons for the NFC South title Sunday in Atlanta. Newton ran for a touchdown and threw for another in his return from a car accident that sidelined him last week. More in Sports
 
I'm not all that fond of "celebrate" photos to begin with; I'd like to have at least as much action as reaction in the visual mix, and I think the emphasis on reaction reflects a larger Dick Vitale-ization of sports that takes some out of the fun out of watching. But at the least, we can ban "celebrate" on grounds of redundancy. Don't tell me what I'm seeing when you can tell me why I'm seeing it.

* And yes, by this point I have a pretty good idea of where the Lions play. If the "Detroit" on every first reference is a rule, let's get rid of that too.

Random images: Your thoughts?

This image arrived in the email the other day along with a good question (bunch of questions, actually), thanks to Barbara Phillips Long:

Part of the problem with the photo, I realized, is that I wondered who the people in the photo were and whether it was a 'real' photo of something actually taking place, or a posed photo of a doctor and a patient, or a posed photo of people pretending to be a doctor and a patient. About the only thing I could say for certain is that it wasn't two toddlers playing doctor.

I agree, and I also share Barbara's summary conclusion: "I'm just not interested in seeing irrelevant photos any more" (discussed earlier in a slightly different context here). Aside from the confusion, whether momentary or not, about who's who, and the potentially more dangerous confusion about whether any other images you see on a site are real or merely illustrative, there's a mechanical question: Is the image worth the time it takes to load on your tablet or other viewing platform of choice?

With all that said, let's open the floor to discussion: Are we seeing more cases of the stock photo used to illustrate the concrete story? Is there a real difference between "a doctor, like the one shown here" and "an Airbus A320, like the one shown here"? Are people hearing from the traffic-counters if a story isn't illustrated? Is there too much of it, or not enough? (Your Editor does admit to occasional bursts of get-off-my-lawnism.) Is this something audiences expect (or that we expect audiences to expect)? Are news sites assuming that such illustrations make stories better liked or better remembered? Are there other habits like this that might be getting routinized in online news presentation?


Comments and thoughts encouraged. This would be a fun topic to look at empirically.

Correction of the (middle-aged) month

My disdain for corrections of the form "should have said" is well founded. (At least, I think so, and if you disagree, hit the comment button and have at it.) It has two main components:

First, I don't know whether "should have said" is empirical or normative -- put a bit differently, whether yours is a sin of commission or a sin of omission. Did you screw up one of the facts you reported, or did you say something (or omit something) in a way that annoyed a politically powerful constituency?

More narrowly, even if I know that "should have said" is about a misstated fact, I don't know which one was misstated. In the cutline at hand, what went wrong? Did we misspell a name? Misstate the ages?* Swap the identities? Let's go to the videotape!

Margot Schoeps and Larry Sutherland, 72, enjoy a moment in the center's common room.

That's a lot to screw up in 14 words. Two identities, one age (oh, all right, we didn't really get Larry's age wrong; we just said he looks a couple decades older than he is), and ... what's that? They weren't even enjoying the moment??? They should have been "sharing a laugh"?

For those who have not traveled much in the realms of gold, "shares a laugh with" is the ultimate in cutline cliches. It outranks "gestures as he speaks," "enjoys the mild weather," even "celebrates" when it comes to separating the sheep from the goats. But for maximum reading pleasure, you need to enjoy it in context of the dominant art above:

Rudy Smolen, 86, left, and Margot Schoeps, 88, share a joke ...

Remember, the paper (the correction ran Tuesday) hasn't yet told me what it got wrong -- just what the cutline "should have" said. So what's the failure here? Is every cutline on the page supposed to say "shares a ..."? Or is that only true when every photo on the page contains someone 80 or older?

Takeaway point: Corrections aren't about what should have happened. They're about what did happen. Tell me exactly what you did wrong, then provide the correct information. And never imagine that you can correct an error by sharing a laugh with it.

* Which, by the way, is not a requirement of cutline style -- any more than the cutline is obliged to point out that, in a photo containing one woman and one man, the one with the feminine name is on the left.

RTFS/LTFP

It's not enough to just read the story before writing the heds. You (ahem) need to look at the pictures too. 

Techically, there's no correction here: the story is all about jets, after all, and no doubt they'll be roaring and soaring, just as the kicker says. But that's not what the package says. The brain has already put "jets" together with a picture of propeller-driven aircraft long before the eyes get to the boring old text.

Hard to believe how many sets of eyes this one must have gone past without even a flicker of curiosity. And there's about as easy a fix as you could ask. Just take out "jets" and leave it as "roaring and soaring." It isn't Shakespeare, but odds are nothing else you write this year will be either.

Another day on Planet Tabloid

It's always a good day when life imitates Com5080. Today's discussion gets us through the tabloid age, which (of course) provides a chance to recall the Graphic's visual coverage of Caruso greeting Valentino in Heaven and other journalistic highlights of the previous century.

The composograph tradition is alive and well. On what planet but the New York Post could you find the governor's head Photoshopped onto a still from a 45-year-old TV show, along with this helpful lede:

Need more proof Albany’s so-called lawmakers are really space cadets? Gov. Paterson, fed up as do-nothing legislators bickered through a budget summit yesterday, groaned, “Oh, Scotty, beam me up,” a play on the classic “Star Trek” line uttered by Capt. Kirk to his engineer, Scotty (right).*

Why it's a "shriek" in the hed but a "groan" in the lede is a mystery. But if the copydesk at the Post would like a free hint: You know, you really could use a big old Donner Party comma** in a phrase like "Beam me up Scotty." This is "Star Trek," not "Fantastic Voyage."

* The handy directional cue appears on the print page, though it isn't in the online lede.
** That's the comma of direct address that distinguishes "Let's eat, kids" from "Let's eat kids." Prof. Fuhlhage was the first to put it in question form: Donner Party or dinner party?.

The press in action

Interesting choice of a front-page visual element for the airline bombing attempt: "Reporters take part in a briefing at the arraignment of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab at the hospital where he was being treated for burns." It's not self-indulgent (at least, not in the way that running a photo of your own reporters would be), but it does say some things about the public understanding of public events.

In a way, it's why people say a disaster or accident was "just like a movie." This is the part of the movie where the DA emerges to face a crowd of reporters shouting questions. Except for the parka and a few similar details, it could be right out of a studio-era crime film. It's not an iconic photo -- building in ruins, firefighter emerging from rubble with baby -- so much as an official signal of the sort of event we're seeing.

The hed strikes me as strange too -- as if it's hedging something it just declared. If there's a "plane plot" involving a character who was subdued by fellow passengers after trying to set off a bomb, it seems pretty self-evident that there are "terror ties." The kicker is the clue. I expect the hed writer is using "terror" as a synonym for "Qaida" (which would fit just fine in the main hed), and that's worth a little more caution. I don't have a problem with calling Qaida "terrorist"; what I'd like to head off is the suggestion that if it isn't Qaida, it isn't terrorism.

Several years back, the Tacoma paper explained its decision not to front a grisly Kashmir-related attack in Mumbai by contending that -- absent a link to the U.S. -- it represented a regional conflict and didn't rise to the level of "international terrorism." Today's example is nowhere near that level of blinkered exceptionalism, but it does suggest that the U.S. media still have trouble talking about terrorism.

Photos and reality: Wheaties test

Comes a request for discussion of the photo at right -- specifically, whether it's appropriate to run pictures of dead dogs on the front. It's always a little tricky to generalize rules from single cases, so (being an agenda-setting sort) I'll tell you a little of what I think about before telling you what I think.

When someone asks what I think about photos of dead animals on 1A, I tend to start with: What kind of animals, and how did they get that way? I don't mean that to be dismissive; I think it's a way of suggesting that most of us would put different photos at different places on the continuum. If there's a chemical spill upstream from My Little Town and the photo is of dead fish crowding the intakes at the water treatment plant, no problem. Dead deer on the first day of the season? I wouldn't front it, but it's pretty easy to imagine cases where that's what the audience would expect. Bear shot dead after running wild up and down Main Street at the peak of back-to-school days? Sure. Dead kitty tortured by local adolescents? Nope.

See a couple of continuums operating there? Mammals are more proximate than fish, and pets more proximate than wild animals. Present danger is bigger than past danger, and public danger bigger than small-scale danger. Ritual news and surprise news raise different sorts of questions. And all those things more or less point to a bigger question: What's the photo saying?

That's a bit of a stumbling block, I think, because decision-makers are inclined to start from the presumption that photos are true, rather than the presumption that photos are highly selective representations of brief moments of reality. Just for the heck of it, here are two AP photos from a press conference by the Rutgers basketball team back during the Don Imus scandal. Is one of them truer than the other? If so, which?

My call (which, I will remind you, is easily worth the price of your subscription) is that they're true about different things. When you choose between them, you're making a discursive choice rather than an "objective" one. Nothing wrong with that, unless you're in the habit of mistaking your truth for the truth.

We're not spending much time on what a mediocre photo is the one that adorns the Venice front, or what a genuinely awful story* it accompanies. I'm not sure those concerns make that much difference -- at least, technical quality itself shouldn't make you change your mind about the ethics of photo play. But the quality issues do speak to a certain incoherence, which goes to the problem above. I really don't know what I'm supposed to be seeing. The story's almost all blotter, no context. If there's some higher good to be served by the photo, no one's making a case for it. "We've got a picture of dead dogs" is a statement of fact; it's not an explanation of what the picture is, and it's not a justification for running it. If I'm going to yank people's chains over breakfast, I'd like to have a stronger reason.

A long time back, I had one of those occasional copydesk-vs.-assigning-desk arguments with a great good friend of many years' standing. His conclusion:** "You get paid to keep stuff out of the paper; I get paid to put stuff in the paper." I tend to put it differently: I get paid -- or did, back in those days -- to make sure that everything going into the paper has a reason. So I'm not really trying to argue the dogs off the front page. I'm suggesting they had no reason to be there in the first place.

Opposing views, as always, are welcome.

* Look, spellcheck isn't a very smart tool, but at least it'll tell you that the cop's name is spelled two different ways.
** Constructed from memory; kids, don't try this at home.