Otterblog

tdfoto.jpg

Sorry for the posting gap. I’ve been in Richmond, at the mother church, for a meeting of editors, TV news directors and Web content managers. Three days of carbs and hearing several futurists talk about either the exciting or terrifying prospects of our industries.

Quite often—the most interesting things you learn at these events—happen in the most serendipitous ways.  One of the key points of this meeting was about how content—news, information and entertainment—moves and moves quickly, and that delivery mechanisms are as important as what’s being delivered. Sometimes they even effect the shape and scope of what’s delivered.

My Aha moment occurred 10 minutes into the three-day meeting, when I was reading the Richmond Times-Dispatch at lunch. The front page had a picture of Anthony Grant, the coach at Virginia Commonwealth University, cutting down the nets after his team beat George Mason U., last year’s NCAA Cinderella, to win the CAA championship. I’ve appended the picture.

What I find interesting about this photo, other than its imagery, is the number of “photographers” in the shot. Check out all those cell cameras in the bottom. This image—or at least one approximating it—will be sent and forwarded dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of time, published if you will, before the T-D hits the streets, the TV station goes live or the Web site story gets posted. The result, news is nearly instant. Just one more challenge for newspapers and television and, yes, even the Internet.

PLOUFF.jpg

We have heard a lot of comments and reaction from people about our decision to publish a photograph of a memorial for Howard Plouff. I’ve attached it above. It’s of a sign that reads in part “YOUR OUR HERO” instead of “OUR HERO”.

The criticism is that we ran a photo that is embarrassing to the WSPD.

The photo by photographer Lauren Carroll is very strong, and while it’s true that it is hard to look at it without seeing the grammatical mistake, I don’t believe that the mistake negates the picture or means we shouldn’t run it. It is what it is. It’s a tribute.

Journal policy is that we quote people faithfully and accurately but also that we don’t go out of our way to make somebody look foolish. With quotes, it is easy when somebody doesn’t speak the King’s English. We can paraphrase. But a photograph is different. We’re not going to photoshop an E and an apostrophe into that picture.

The larger points are that 1) we can’t be the grammar police for the world and 2) that we didn’t go out of our way to find this photo. It’s part of breaking news, and for us to tell folks “We’d like to go take a picture of it, but you need to get the grammar fixed first” makes us part of the story.

Let me know your thoughts.

Typically, when people are arrested and charged with newsworthy crimes, we run their pictures in the paper. In the case of the man charged with murder in the death of the Winston-Salem police officer, that hasn’t happened—yet.

The reason is that the police were still doing lineups at the time of the arrest, and they asked us to withhold publication under the idea that the integrity of the lineup might be compromised if the man’s picture was published.

Complying with these sorts of requests puts us in a difficult position, and our agreement was reluctant. We did so because of the unique nature of this crime, i.e. an officer shot to death in the parking lot outside a nightclub, where there are hundreds of potential witnesses. Not your usual crime scene. In addition, this arrest comes on the heels of the Sykes report, which details all the problems police had with lineups in that case.

We told the police that we would give them three days to do their lineups, then we would publish pictures of the accused when they made journalistic sense to do so.

The Speaker for the Speaker of the House: A former Journal staffer has gotten a promotion of sorts. Bill Holmes, who was an editor and reporter here in the late 1990s and early 2000s was just named the spokesman for new House Speaker Joe Hackney. He had left the Journal to go work for the Associated Press. Bill grew up in Surry County and went to N.C. State.