Charles Paul Freund has a fine piece at Reason Online about the complexities of controlling war images and the public's reaction to them. A lot of the discussion about the Dover photos seems to hinge upon the speaker's personal opinion of the war and how release/suppression of such photos will bring the public around to their point of view. This is rather simplistic, as Freud points out. For the first two years of World War II, the government suppressed all documentary images of American death, just as they had in World War I, for fear such images would demoralize the public and erode support for the war. But by 1943, they decided the public had grown complacent about the war and released many images of American dead to shore up support and drive home the point that the war was far from won.

There is, of course, an apparent contradiction between these two approaches. If FDR's original view was valid—that death images would demoralize the public—then displaying it in the latter part of the war (when the vast majority of U.S. war deaths occurred) risked undermining the American military's demands for unconditional surrender, at least in Europe. If his later, revised view was correct—that death imagery would increase public fervor—then displaying them in the first, dark months of the war might well have helped counteract the effect of so much negative military news. (As it happens, "Noble Sacrifice" against great odds was the underlying theme of many early Hollywood war movies.)

There is an obvious third proposition: Neither of these generalizations about the effect of death imagery was necessarily correct. While there is often a plain and unchanging personal meaning in such images of death, there is no inevitable political meaning in them; rather, their political meaning and impact can change according their context. The most important factor in that context is probably not whether a given conflict appears to be going well, but whether the viewer of such images believes the war's cause to be just, and its pursuit purposeful. If you believe that about the Iraq war, then you probably interpret the coffin images a certain way; if you don't, you probably see a different picture.

Hiding such imagery, as many administrations have done, is in the end an act of self-defeating censorship, one that raises questions about the state's view of the citizens it is sending to war, and potentially about the state's view of the war itself. However, disseminating such images as an act of war criticism is reductionist and prone to backfire, because such an act seeks to impose a single political meaning on images whose meaning is changing and fluid. Whether such images portray honorable sacrifice or something very different depends on how the viewers of the images perceive the war itself, and not, as some involved in this debate seem to believe, the other way around.

Longtime Fortune photo editor Michele McNally has been named director of photography at The New York Times.

McNally's title as director of photography is an upgrade in authority--photo chiefs at the Times have previously held the title of picture editor. One source familiar with management thinking says the title change shows that [NYT Editor Bill] Keller and the other top editors have full confidence in McNally, and that alone should help her break down communication barriers between departments.

"Michele has a breaking-news metabolism, a sharp and daring eye for the memorable image, and the know-how and relentless energy to make things happen," Keller wrote. "We're confident she will provide both the strong creative leadership we need to sustain the ambitious photography to which our readers have become accustomed in recent years, and the strong management skills to run a large and complicated department."

Photographers describe McNally as a strong editor and an impassioned defender of photojournalism. In addition to her work for the magazine, she regularly judges industry competitions and has worked as a mentor to young photographers at the World Press Photo's prestigious Masterclass in Amsterdam.

In the foreign press, Asahi Shimbun, Medellin's El Colombiano, Folha de Sao Paulo, Der Tagesspiegel, Beirut's An Nahar, El Pais, The London Daily Telegraph and Porto Algre's Zero Hora ran Dover military photos on the front page. In the U.S., 16 papers decided they missed the boat yesterday and one ran another one for good measure: Arkansas Democrat Gazette, Burlington Free Press, Columbus Dispatch, Charlotte Observer, Dayton Daily News, The Oklahoman, The Desert Sun, Greensburg Tribune-Review, Lawrence Journal World, The Harrisburg Patriot-News, Portland Press Herald, Salt Lake Tribune, The Toledo Blade, The Lakeland Ledger, The Times-Picayune, The Roanoke Times and Tacoma News Tribune (again!).

The Boston Globe may have a scoop today. They appear to be alone in reporting that the Pentagon will review the policy that bans photography when soldiers' remains are returned to the U.S., and that White House support for the ban may be getting a bit squishy.

Aides to Bush said yesterday that he was shown the images and found them to be an important "reminder of the sacrifice" made by US troops. Nevertheless, White House officials repeated their support for the ban, which they say respects the privacy of the soldiers' families.

But yesterday it appeared they would not rule out dropping or changing it if political pressure mounts. Asked directly whether Bush's message is that the ban will be maintained, White House spokesman Trent Duffy said, "The message is that the sensitivities and the privacy of the families of the fallen must be the first priority."

Some of the photos from Dover AFB released to The Memory Hole included images of the coffins of the Columbia astronauts arriving at the base in February 2003. The Department of Defense did not differentiate these photos from those of soldiers' coffins. Nicole comments in the previous post:

I wish I could find a better source for which coffin photos are the Columbia ones. I'd be interested to know if there are any that ran on covers, now that we know which papers ran the photos.

>DOD Misidentifies Photos of Columbia Crew Remains Arriving at Dover AFB as Being Iraq War Dead [SpaceRef.com]
>Dover AFB gallery [The Memory Hole]
>Dover AFB gallery mirror site [Warblogging.com, via Elisabeth Donovan]

Looks like about 23 of 179 American newspapers on the Newseum used a military coffins photo on the front page today: Boston Globe, New York Daily News, Colorado Springs Gazette, Cedar Rapids Gazette, New York Times, Wilmington News Journal, Tacoma News Tribune, Orlando Sentinel, Palm Beach Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Santa Rosa Press Democrat, Seattle Post-Intellegencer, St. Petersburg Times, Washington Post, Washington Times, L.A. Times and Dallas Morning News (no link).

The Anchorage Daily News, San Francisco Chronicle, Sacramento Bee, San Jose Mercury News, Hackensack Record and Chicago Sun-Times ran the Tami Silicio photo, and the Seattle Times fronted a story about the Memory Hole FOIA release, but ran no photos on the front.

Update: It will also be the lead photo on Saturday's International Herald Tribune.

Update v2.0: I've given the pages new links that won't be rotten by Saturday. Also clarified what some papers ran and added a couple.

The Dover photos have hit the wire, along with a Bill Carter NYT piece. Not on the website yet. It says the Pentagon "labeled the decision to grant the [FOIA] request a mistake." Here's the traditional-media-drops-the-ball-internet-runs-with-it angle that will doubtless echo across the net tomorrow:

Executives at news organizations, many of whom have protested the policy [of banning photography of war dead at Dover], said Thursday night they had not known that the Defense Department itself was taking photographs of the coffins arriving home, a fact that only came to light when Russ Kick, the operator of The Memory Hole filed a Freedom of Information Act request.

"We were not aware at all that these photos were being taken," said Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times.

John Banner, the executive producer of ABC's "World News Tonight," said, "We did not file a FOIA request ourselves, because this was the first we had known that the military was shooting these pictures."

Update: As of the 7:30 ET advisory, this story was planned for downpage A1 of the Times. Also, as Aaron Brown just showed, it will be the A1 centerpiece of the Philly Inquirer.

Update: The WaPo's story, skedded for A10, is here. And the Times story is now here.

>Photos of Soldiers' Coffins Revive Controversy [The Washington Post]
>Pentagon Ban on Pictures of Dead Troops Is Broken [The New York Times]

Mario won't have to worry about that mortgage payment for a little while, at least. A memo posted at VisualEditors.com says he's signed on to help with the redesign of the KC Star slated for late 2005 or so.

But Garcia Media won't be doing this alone. In fact the bulk of the work will be done by The Star's newsroom. Virtually every one of you will be involved in this effort in some manner over the next several months. With Mario on board, we will begin to develop several standing committees of newsroom staffers and employees from throughout The Star to help us navigate through the endless design, typography, training, content and promotional issues involved in a redesign of this scale. We also will discuss, craft and distribute our editorial goals for the new Star. In conversations already with department heads and others, we know we want it to be visually surprising. We want it to be functional - as easy to use and navigate as any paper in America. It must be even more targeted to readers, both geographically through zoning and demographically through content. It must be interactive, tying in our online site in a more consistent and sophisticated way. We need for it to be easy to maintain, but flexible enough to update. It should include a great many content improvements - which are much more important for long-term readership success than any design element. And finally, it should reflect our community, visibly and intrinsically. It should look and feel like The Kansas City Star, not a paper from another community.

>Kansas City Star redesign [VisualEditors.com]

In the wake of the Silicio firing, there's more bad PR for the government. In what's developing into something of a perfect storm for photos of military coffins, The Memory Hole received the results of an FOIA request for photos of military coffins at Dover Air Force Base. The site now has a gallery of 361 photos. The administration will probably take a bigger PR hit on this than if they'd just allowed photos in the first place.

>Photos of Military Coffins (Casualties From Iraq) at Dover Air Force Base [The Memory Hole]

The Seattle Times says they're sorry Tami Silicio was fired, but that she knew the risks.

In several e-mails and telephone conversations, [photo editor Barry] Fitzsimmons told Silicio that publishing the photograph -- which depicts more than 20 coffins of fallen U.S. soldiers loaded on a cargo plane at Kuwait International Airport -- could bring repercussions.

But Silicio insisted that the Times run the photo to show the tremendous respect given to the soldiers' remains as they were loaded onto the plane for the trip home.

Despite Silicio's firing, the Times doesn't regret publishing the picture. "It is certainly unfortunate that she got fired but she was fully aware of that possibility beforehand," Managing Editor David Boardman told E&P.

Katz is not sorry, either. "I absolutely have no regrets," she said. "The support I've received from the media and the public has been overwhelming."

An alert reader informs us that Tami Silicio, the contract worker who took the photo on the front page of Sunday's Seattle Times, has been fired.

Silicio was let go yesterday for violating U.S. government and company regulations, said William Silva, president of Maytag Aircraft, the contractor that employed Silicio at Kuwait International Airport.

"I feel like I was hit in the chest with a steel bar and got my wind knocked out. I have to admit I liked my job, and I liked what I did," Silicio said.

>Woman loses her job over coffins photo [Seattle Times]
>Images of war dead a sensitive subject [Seattle Times]

Cavendish links to a Westword story on the Post's redesign, and Tom Mangan offers Seven Tips for Copy Editors to Survive a Redesign.

4) Do not provoke the hammer of the design gods. They are above you, but that does not mean they hate you. They think rather kindly of you so long as you avoid your strongest urge: to nit-pick every third decision they've made. The design gods must be appeased, lest they be provoked to do another redesign in two years. So, be good to them, earn their respect and good wishes, tell them they are wise ... whatever it takes to keep them happy with this design so they can perhaps be diverted from thinking of the next one.

Speaking of jobs, sure seems there's a boomlet out there. And not just for jobs like night cops/photographer/copy editor at the East Jesus Gazette. Some plum spots in Miami, Chicago (Red Streak!), DC (well, McLean Va.), New York (and here and here and here), Seattle, Savannah, Salt Lake, Olympia, Boulder, Charlotte and Indianapolis.

If there's not a city there that appeals to you, it might be time for a new continent.

>SND job bank [snd.org]

Interesting thread at VisualEditors.com on the new Denver Post redesign, which will debut May 4.

Robb Montgomery saw it at the SND Quick Course and says:

"The new 'Post' will be very clean with a flexible grid and a strong 'vertical' stress. J. Damon Cain presented what looks like a serious upgrade that celebrates great writing, refined images and serious typographic goodness. Best part is - they did the work in-house. Kudos and can't wait to see see it in newsprint."

No consultants?? That's downright un-American! Garcia and Jacobson and Harrower have mortgages, you know.

Damon Cain, the Post's M.E./Presentation & Design says:

"Have spent a good deal of time working the typographical hierarchies, from big displays to agate, from news to features, and on developing individual personalities for the individual sections. Need to work on our visual storytelling DNA, but that'll come."

Also, the dogleg appears to be continuing its comeback:

"The dogleg head is an option that helps elevate our lead art. We believe in consistency but we don't want to be restrictive. Content still leads the way. Thus the flexible grid, too."

Cain also notes they're looking for an A1 designer.

>REPORT: Denver Quick Course [VisualEditors.com]

The website is annoyingly designed (those tiny little scrolling windows! Why? WHY?) and, erm, pink (you didn't know that cosmopolitans were related to newspaper design, did you?), but the folks at the University of Missouri chapter of the Student Society for News Design are beginning to post the results of the College Newspaper Design contest. Looks like the kids at the Ball State Daily News cleaned up. Go look for your future interns.

Update: Well, revoke my alumni privileges and bar me from Shakespeare's forever! In the comments, Emmet Smith (Ball State grad) actually, you know, counted the awards instead of just eyeballing it and has informed me (Missouri grad) that there were "23 awards for Mizzou plus a third and honorable mention in the Designer of the year category to 19 awards and a 2nd in DOY for Ball State. Ball State did win for overall design with Mizzou a no-show and they swept 1-3 in page one design." Well! Score one for reporting! (I blame the pink background.) And go Tigers!

>College Newspaper Design contest [MU Student Society for News Design]
>Ball State Daily News PDF archive

Yes, it's from yesterday, but it's just a helluva photo. It was taken by Tami Silicio, a contract employee from the Seattle area who works in the cargo terminal of the U.S. military area at Kuwait International Airport.

Executive Editor Michael Fancher wrote about the photo in Sunday's paper.

When the photo arrived, "I just said wow," [Seattle Times photo editor Barry] Fitzsimmons recalls. "The picture was something we don't have access to as the media," and yet it seemed undeniably newsworthy.

What the caller had was the picture on today's front page. It shows rows of flag-draped military coffins inside an airplane in Kuwait. These were America's war dead on their way home at a moment when U.S. troops are experiencing their deadliest month of the war.

Fitzsimmons felt the picture should be published, but "it's too powerful an image just to drop into the newspaper." The Times would first need to learn the story behind it.

Leon Espinoza, news editor, had the same reaction. "The photo without question is a very powerful image, one seldom seen. It shows the great care taken to honor the fallen soldiers, and it can't help but show the toll a war takes.

"It's a photo that demands context. The photo needs to be viewed in context of the story behind it, a story the picture — as powerful as it is — can only partly tell. Simply put, we need to show the whole picture, and getting the story right is essential to doing that," Espinoza said. ...

... Readers likely will have differing reactions to the photo, depending on their views of the war.

"It's a photo that evokes an emotional response and one that people are sure to see through their own filters, political or otherwise," said Espinoza, who is responsible for the Sunday front page.

>Powerful photograph offered chance to tell an important story [The Seattle Times]
>The somber task of honoring the fallen [The Seattle Times]

On Tuesday, the topic on NPR's daily gabfest Talk of the Nation will be war photography.

Reading news reports about four Americans killed and mutilated in Fallujah was shocking, but seeing the pictures was even more disturbing for many. What images should we see from a war zone? And how do editors decide what to run?

Update: It's on now. Kenny Irby is the main guest. And the audio link is here.

>Talk of the Nation [NPR]

Ryan Pitts of the Spokesman-Review and the Dead Parrot Society notes in the comments to my original post about the APME survey that he's the producer that set up the survey, and has posted the full text of the questions on the Dead Parrot blog. Thanks, buddy!

He also adds:

I just chatted with Ken [Sands, APME board member and Managing Editor of Online and New Media at The Spokesman-Review] to make sure on APME's position: Because the survey wasn't scientific, it's important not to draw too strict of conclusions on the numbers. For this reason, there were no hard breakdowns on who would have run the photos inside the paper vs. on A1, for example, or on differences in opinion if the victims had been soldiers. But the survey was instructive in a lot of ways, and getting 2,000 responses certainly gives you a good look at the base of opinion out there.

Rumbo, the new chain of Spanish-language dailies planned for the U.S. by Meximerica Media, has a quite a design pedigree. DaniloBlack's Roger Black, a founder of Meximerica, is heading up the design. And Meximerica was just acquired by Recoletos Grupo de Comunicacion, a Spanish media company which also owns the Madrid sports daily Marca.

From the Meximerica site:

Rumbo will give readers what repeated polls say they want but no other newspaper gives: a tabloid with a high story count of short well-edited articles broken up by unique enterprise and service stories with lots of explanatory graphics, and almost all in color. Rumbo has the advantage of being created from scratch, with no historical baggage. Black and staff design director Raúl Braulio Martínez, the former design head of the Editorial Televisa magazine group and of Mexico's award winning El Norte newspaper, are giving Rumbo a warm color scheme and look appealing to Hispanics. In a survey by the Readership Institute of Northwestern University, Hispanics ranked presentation as the most important aspect they looked for in a newspaper. The prototypes will be unveiled closer to the date of publication.

>Meximerica Media Announces Launch of a New Chain of Hispanic Daily Newspapers Throughout the United States [Yahoo Finance, via editorsweblog.org]

The New York Times will launch a revamped "SundayBusiness" section this weekend. The section will feature

expanded editorial content, stylish new graphics and new columnists, including former television host and economist Ben Stein and Atlantic Monthly columnist James Fallows. The section will also have additional color pages, shorter articles with at-a-glance features and increased editorial coverage on business trends, corporate newsmakers, technology, consumer buying, personal finance and career advice.

New features and columns in "SundayBusiness" will include:

• A finance news column from economist Ben Stein.

• "Suits," a column about the movers and shakers in corporate America.

• "Digital Domain," written by author and historian Randall Stross, which will cover trends emerging in Silicon Valley.

• "The Techno-Files," written by National Book Award-winner James Fallows.

• "The Goods," written by Generation X reporter Brendan Koerner who will assess the hottest new consumer products hitting the market.

• "Sunday Profile," a monthly question and answer column by Laura Rich that will spotlight today's most interesting chief executive officers.

• Details of the latest business mergers, acquisitions and investment deals by Andrew Ross Sorkin.

• A back page that will include a column called "Armchair MBA" with different gurus and instructors offering their insights into the business world.

• "Shelf Life," which will review current business book titles.

Aha! It's "Generation X" they're after! Explains the "color pages, shorter articles and at-a-glance features!" They do know, don't they, that while reading Ben Stein, all us GenX'ers will just be thinking "Bueller... Bueller..."?

Next up, "MondayMondayDon'tTrustThatDayBusiness!" Which will feature expanded Boomer content, stylish, cutting-edge Peter Max illustrations and new columnists, including former musician David Crosby and Rolling Stone columnist Ben Fong-Torres.

The section will also have additional psychedelic color pages, larger type, ink that won't befoul the Egyptian cotton sheets in your Hampton house and increased editorial coverage on Pottery Barn trends, golf technology, Volvo buying, meat-free finance and advice on what to think about Dylan's latest marketing move.

>The New York Times Introduces "SundayBusiness'' [New York Times Company, via VisualEditors.com]

Hey, biz designer buddies, tired of all the white guys in suits infesting your pages? The Fab Five too busy to clean out the squalid bathroom that is your business section? Bonita Burton, Business design director at the Merc, has got your back with 10 Tips for Better Business Page Design.

If you've ever worked the room at a party and avoided the intellectual in the corner who's completely out of place in a decades-old leisure suit, you can empathize with the experience many readers have flipping through the newspaper and encountering the business section.

The problem with allowing the geek in the glasses to remain a visual wallflower is that he actually is a great conversationalist with some really fascinating stuff to say. Business stories are rich with some of the most compelling life-and-death subject matter, exploring the intersection of power and money and what all of that means to John and Jane Doe.

But the visual storytelling in most business sections still does not reflect this energy or excitement. Their image doesn't begin to project their personality. And while everyone else at the party has gone through make-over after make-over in efforts to attract readers, business is still sporting that look that says he's playing hard to get and isn't that much fun to spend time with anyway.

Poynter today has an article about the APME National Credibility Roundtables Project, which sponsored a survey after the Fallujah photos ran. Twenty-nine news organizations across the country e-mailed 13,642 readers beginning Friday, April 2.

They asked about a particular photo, which showed Iraqis cheering as the burned, mutilated bodies of two Americans hung from a bridge.

By the following Thursday, 2,009 readers had responded. Of these, 58 percent approved of the image being published in a newspaper or on a website; 39 percent objected to using the picture.

Update: In the comments, reader Chuck Welch notes that he was one of the surveyed readers and reproduces part of the survey. He also says:

The questions were the expected ones (all paraphrased): Would you have run the picture and why or why not and where? Would you have given your reasons for showing or not showing the photo. What about children seeing the photos? What if the faces were visible? Would it matter if the bodies had been soldiers or civilians?

Also, APME now has a story on their site. It's nearly identical to the Poynter article, but they also have a bunch more quotes from readers here, and a page of links to the stories participating newspapers ran on the survey.

>Readers react to photos from Fallujah [APME]
>More Comments: Fallujah Photo Project [APME]
>Nationwide Coverage of APME Roundtables' Fallujah Photo Project [APME]

You may have noticed I'm monkeying with the left-hand rail a bit. Mainly, I figured out how to pop-ups of daily front-page images. They're grabbed directly from the Newseum site, so some of them may occasionally pop up blank (some of the Euro papers probably will on weekends.) I may add some more there, but I don't want it to get too cluttered. Suggestions? Lemme know!

In today's Chicago Sun-Times:

Sure, it's only three grafs and 60 words, and it's 10,000 miles from Chicago, but who can resist putting that hed on A1?

The Newport Daily News finally gets around to thinking about the Fallujah photos:

The Daily News did not run any of the photographs out of Fallujah that day. In fact, we did not even discuss the possibility of running them, as our general policy is not to run graphic or gruesome photographs. This is in keeping with our sensibilities - and those of our readers - as a community newspaper.

But when I looked at the photographs, particularly one that clearly showed children celebrating as the charred remains of two bodies hung behind them, I experienced the sheer power of those images. I felt disgust, almost to the verge of being physically sick. I felt angry. I felt frightened. And I felt sorrow.

I do not know that I could have felt all of those things from reading a written account of the scene. I still cannot say that we would have - or should have - run the photograph that day. But in hindsight, I wonder if our policy is too prohibitive. Much like we do with local photographs, we should at least debate the merits of publishing such photos from the national or international wires before deciding not to run them.

>Graphic content intended to inform, not offend, readers [The Newport Daily News, via Romenesko]

A reader tipped me off to this "ad campaign" (an April Fool's joke, I suspect) mentioned in an adcritic.com newsletter. It reimagines four covers from various historical events with the tagline "New York's most colorful newspaper for 200 years."

Here's a Lewis and Clark cover:

I like the deck heds on this one:

Clark loses fight about whose name should be first

Lewis privately confides that Sacagawea is "hot"

Indians not buying Thomas Jefferson as new "great father"

And the others:

The Newseum has archived the front pages from March 12, the day after the Madrid bombings, and they've added front pages from the day after Fallujah in their "War in Iraq" section.

>Madrid bombings front pages [Newseum]
>War in Iraq front pages [Newseum]

On this High Holy Day in Christen- and Golf-dom, spare a moment to remember the Ones who carry us through the rough patches. Who soothe our souls when the proofs are late. Who becalm our jittery, latte-deprived spirits when the ideas won't flow. Who rescue us with multiple undo's when we have used the Magic Wand in an unnatural fashion. No, I do not speak of the Assistant Managing Editor for Visuals, for she is part of the Problem. I speak of the Six Patron Saints of Graphic Design. They are, if you have forgotten your Design Catechism: St. Anxieté, St. Concepta, St. Exacto, St. Pantone, St. Pixela and St. Typo.

Perhaps the our most neglected saint of late is St. Pixela, Patron of Retouching and Comfy Chairs:

Isabel de Santa Maria y del Madonna de Guadalupe, who preferred to be addressed by her confirmation name of Pixela, was a Moorish princess. Her father, King Wacom, persecuted artists and kept them prisoner in his castle where they worked tirelessly, day and night, in a cold room with no lights or windows. Pixela secretly visited the prisoners, bringing them food and venti cappuccinos. Upon befriending one prisoner in particular, the Bishop of Photoshop, she discovered a calling for recreating his paintings at a larger size after he'd finished painting them. She lived as a solitary by the Lake of Saint Vector, died at the age of 100, and is still revered worldwide.

>The Patron Saints of Graphic Design [W. Lynn Garrett, via Creative Generalist]

Speaking of champagne, it was Pulitzer day, and the LAT walked away with five of 'em. With a win for feature photography, the Times' visual staff continues its outstanding year. Here's a look at what the folks on Spring Street have snagged in the past couple of months.

Pulitzers
• Breaking news
• National reporting
• Criticism
• Editorial writing
• Feature photography: Carolyn Cole

NPPA Best of Photojournalism
• Newspaper Photographer of the Year: Carolyn Cole
• Six other awards

POY
• Newspaper Photographer of the Year: Carolyn Cole
• Overall Excellence in Editing
• 19 other awards

SND
• Gold award and Judges' Special Recognition: Photojournalism staff portfolio
• Gold award: Photojournalism project or story, single page
• Gold award: Photo series, multiple pages
• 60 other awards

Update: Also, I am reminded, the LAT won the staff category in the ACES headline contest.

Huzzah!

Cool! We're Feedster's Feed of the Day! And with kind links from folks I've long admired like Kottke, Haughey, Jarvis, The Morning News and even Hoder's Persian blog, this humble weblog has been in the Blogdex Top 20 all weekend. I rather figured this site would just burble along with a nice little niche audience (and it probably will calm back down to that), but this shows that when things get hot, people really are interested and have deep feelings about how we present the news to them. A good thing for all you ink-stained wretches to remember.

Champagne for everyone!

Choire Sicha, head Gawker and 15th Most Loathsome New Yorker e-mails:

I'm wondering if you can shed any light on the clock in the IHT's logo (which I love as well). It appears to read 6:11 o'clock, which makes me terribly curious. Perhaps there is an obvious reason for this and I am stupid... but of course many other things in this logo make little if any sense as well.

Good question! I had no clue, so it seemed a fair reason to risk life-threatening injury by pulling from the bookshelf Richard Kluger's 801-page "The Paper: The Life and Death of The New York Herald Tribune." (It looks mighty impressive sitting next there next to Bradlee's book, but I've never made it past page 38.)

A strange device appeared as the centerpiece of the logotype at the top of the first page of the New York Tribune on April 10, 1866, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the paper's founding, and remained there ever after - a banner unique among the newspapers of the world. It is there still atop the International Herald Tribune. Staff members over the years came to call the odd little drawing "the dingbat," which Webster's defines as meaning, among other choices, "thing, object, or contrivance." A contrivance it surely was: in the middle of the crudely drawn tableau is a clock reading twelve minutes past six - no one knows why (conceivably it was the moment of Horace Greely's birth); to the left, Father Time sits in brooding contemplation of antiquity, represented by the ruin of a Greek temple, a man and his ox plowing, a caravan of six camels passing before two pyramids, and an hourglass; to the right, a sort of Americanized Joan of Arc, arms outstretched beneath a backwards-billowing Old Glory, welcomes modernity in the form of a chugging railroad train, factories with smoking chimneys, an updated plow, and an industrial cogwheel (over which the incautious heroine is about to trip); atop the clock, ready to take off into the boundless American future, is an eagle - all for no extra cost. It was a baroque snapshot of time arrested, an allegorical hieroglyph of the newspaper's function to render history on the run.

So there you are! More than you possibly could have wanted to know! But there's more! In 1965 the Herald Tribune staged a musical revue titled "The Saga of the Dingbat." Starring Hal Linden! Sample lyrics:

"We've got a style
That's versatile
That's what fine writing brings
That's why the Herald Tribune swings."

Why doesn't the Times try this? They could get some killer material out of Howell Raines. Tell Frank Rich to get off his ass and do some real work!

Anyway, for the six of you who haven't already clicked over to Wonkette, the HT apparently reworked the logo at some point. There's now an airplane, some telephone wires, the smokestacks magically produce no pollution, that sort of thing. But most disturbingly, WHAT HAPPENED TO THE SIXTH CAMEL??

Scott Goldman, assistant sports editor in charge of the design of
The Washington Post's sports sections, has been named the AME for visuals at the Indy Star.

Goldman, 35, will start his new job May 3.

"There seems to be a great energy in the newsroom and the entire paper for improving the paper and making it something great," Goldman said. "I'm excited to be part of that."

His goal is to make The Star "the best-looking paper of our size anywhere in the country," he said. "It's a lofty goal, but I think it's one that's very attainable."

The Star's daily circulation is 252,000 and 365,000 on Sundays.

>Scott Goldman named visuals editor [Indianapolis Star]

A good thread at Metafilter (which also includes a generous link to this blog from Metafilter founder and über-blogger Matt Haughey) about sex, violence and grisly photos in the media. "CrazyJub" writes:

"Start saving for your childrens future therapy. What they learned this month is dead bodies being burnt and strung up on a bridge is ok to print on the front page of a newspaper, and watch on the news at dinner time; but you better not see any nipple, even for a half a second."

Do you guys that want to see the photos saying that because you didn't like the war, or do you really think charred bodies is something appropriate for the front page news?

It's probably due to seeing photos from concentration camps and hiroshima bombings as a kid, but I don't see the need for photos of dead bodies where you can make out individuals. I just don't see any reason to run those on the front page, whether that's from a war, a plane wreck, or a car accident. I'm not the type of person to say "what about the children!" but some of these photos (like the madrid bombings where you can see a severed limb) would be more at home at rotten.com or alt.binaries.tasteless, not a major newspaper.

>Nippallujah [MetaFilter]

Editors took to the ombudsmen columns Sunday to explain their decisions about the Fallujah photos. I've included links to images of the pages I have.

The Washington Post [page]

The picture chosen for Page One, (Assistant Managing Editor Bill) Hamilton explains, "seemed to capture the motivation and mood of what happened in Fallujah better than anything we saw. We were of course concerned that it also showed human remains. We decided to crop out a limb that clearly indicated the blackened mass was a body. It was possible to look at that picture and not immediately know what you were looking at." The bridge picture was initially rejected for the front page as too graphic. "You knew exactly what you were looking at," he says. Then, it was reconsidered, in part because of Executive Editor Len Downie's concern that, like the incident in Somalia, "this day could become a hugely symbolic one in the course of the Iraq war." After more discussion, the consensus was that the other picture conveyed what had happened and that the picture of the bridge would have been "overkill" on the front page.

The Toronto Star [page]

In her corner office yesterday, managing editor Mary Deanne Shears comfortably answered the question with three of her own:

"Are we hiding the story? No. Are we telling the story? Yes. Are we telling the story with 100 per cent intensity (by not running the bridge picture)? No."

The Salt Lake Tribune [page]

According to Editor Nancy Conway, the decision to run a small photo of a burning Humvee on the front page and run the photo of the bodies hanging from the bridge inside, with a warning of graphic content on A1, was based on the philosophy of "not censoring or sanitizing the news." Also a part of the Tribune discussion was the "realization that some people don't want their children to see it. This allowed parents to make those decisions and warn children if parents did want them to see the image."

Palm Beach Post [page]

What dozens of readers considered "poor judgment," however, the paper's editors considered good news judgment. "We selected that photograph, after a lot of thought and discussion, because it's a powerful news image of a dramatic, horrific and brutal day in Iraq," Post Managing Editor John Bartosek said. "I think it best showed the barbarism of the ambush and its aftermath, and the jubilation of the Iraqis who participated or watched it.

"The violence in Iraq directed at American troops and civilians has been a continuing story for months." Mr. Bartosek said. "But this was not a normal day in Iraq, not just another typical day of violence. We picked a photo that shows the bodies in the background but still captures the news. Similar photos have often been available from that war zone, as well as from Afghanistan, the Middle East and Indonesia. We don't normally publish them, nor do we publish dead bodies in Interstate 95 accidents. This was the biggest story of the day, so we played it at the top of the page."

The Oregonian [page]

Other editors sought a middle ground. Tom Maurer argued the news value of the photographs required the newspaper to publish one for readers. Maurer recommended offering readers some control: Warn them on the front page that a grisly photograph appears inside.

Editor Sandy Rowe agreed with his reasoning. She put a story and a photo that did not show bodies on Page One, along with a note warning readers that a picture showing two bodies was inside.

Hartford Courant [page]

Managing Editor Cliff Teutsch explained that it was a collective decision among news editors, photo editors and graphic design editors to publish the pictures that sickened so many of you Thursday.

"The reason we put that picture on the front page so prominently was because it was an important part of the story about Iraq, where the United States has been engaged in war and is trying to bring democracy," Teutsch said. "The picture showed the emotion of the people demonstrating. It gave a much more complete understanding of what's going on over there."

"It's our job to not only tell the things that are going on but to show what's going on. Throughout our paper - in the Sports section, in the Life section, in Town News - we tell stories by using words and photos. ... I think most readers would say we weren't doing our job if we didn't show that picture."

Fort Worth Star-Telegram [page]

The small picture, played as secondary art in a two-photo package, showed the charred remains of one civilian hanging from a bridge over the Euphrates River while a crowd of Iraqi men and boys celebrated.

Editors decided that the gravity of the horrific development called for extraordinary candor and illustrated the story accordingly. Many photographs that were far more chilling were available, but editors opted for restraint out of concern for the public's sensibilities.

Editors also anticipated reader reaction to the image and offered an explanation in a note to readers saying that "the editors felt it was necessary to publish at least a small image to accurately convey the horror of the incident." And they invited readers to share their opinions about publishing the photograph.

Florida Times-Union

There were many decisions to be made. Which photos were most newsworthy? Which were unsuitable for publication? Some showed close-ups of the bodies.

The result was that the Times-Union used a photo of burning vehicles on the front page. Next to that photo was an editor's note informing readers of a disturbing photo inside the section. The photo showed American bodies hanging from a bridge. The photo was run in black and white, which meant it was not so graphic.

Charleston Post and Courier [page]:

Executive Editor John Huff met with key staff members over the course of several hours Wednesday afternoon and night to consider the newspaper's obligation to provide readers with information they need to know, although it might conflict with reader sensibilities.

He made the decision to use the photo on 1A because he believed that "without it, the full scope of the incident in which U.S. citizens were killed would not have been conveyed."

The reactions to the Fallujah photos are rolling in. Romenesko, naturally, rounds up all the links for us.

The ACES list also has some reaction, including this from John McIntyre at the Baltimore Sun:

The Sun's Page One carried the photo of the bodies suspended from the bridge.

We received something like 60 complaints by letter, telephone call and e-mail, castigating us for (a) offenses against common decency, (b) insensitivity to the families of the victims, (c)willingness to scar children's delicate sensibilities, and (d) pursuit of a political agenda to discourage support of the president's war effort.

There were no responses supportive of the decision to publish the photos. On the other hand, 60 complaints out of a readership of around half a million do not constitute an overwhelming response. To put the matter in perspective: a few years ago, The Sun dropped the London Times crossword puzzle, and the reader respresentative received something like 2,000 complaints.

The E&P article also says: "Arguably, the most graphic front-page images were shown by The Washington Post and USA Today. Both displayed Iraqis taking turns beating the burned corpses with shoes."

That would be this:

Interestingly, The Globe and Mail says just about the opposite: "But in general, newspapers played it safe. USA Today, like The Guardian in Britain, used a picture of an Iraqi boy using a shoe to beat the grey dust of what was once a corpse. Both papers, however, rendered the ashes more indistinct than they were in the original pictures."

Here's the original photo by Ali Jasim of Reuters:

And the WaPo's crop:

I would agree that USAT's crop, and to a much less extent, the Post's, makes the body's form a bit less distinct. But I wouldn't characterize that as "playing it safe."

>Philly Inquirer gets 185 complaints re charred bodies photo [Romenesko]
>7 of Top 20 Papers Published Front-Page Fallujah Body Photos [E&P]
>In pictures [A Capital Idea]
>Packaging news when the picture is not pretty [The Globe and Mail]

After slogging around the Newseum today (time for a server upgrade, buddies!), I can report some Actual True Facts about newspapers' use of the Fallujah photos.

Of the 163 American newspapers on the Newseum today...

118 ran no pictures of bodies on the front page.

45 ran pictures of charred bodies in some form on the front.

33 led the front page with pictures of bodies strung up or burning.

63 led with a photo that had no bodies in it. Of these, 7 ran a smaller, secondary picture of bodies.

35 ran no pictures of the event at all on the front page. Of these, 9 also ran no story.

Newspapers that ran the bodies on the bridge photo included The Miami Herald, the Allentown Morning Call, the Palm Beach Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the New York Post, the Chicago Tribune, The Tampa Trib and the St. Pete Times.

Newspapers that ran photos without bodies included The Seattle Times, the Sun-Times, the San Jose Mercury News, The Oregonian, The Detroit News, The Boston Globe and the Orlando Sentinel. The (Lakeland, Fla.) Ledger and the New York Sun appear to be among the few American papers that actually ran photos of bodies burning as their main A1 image. Canada's National Post did as well.

It would be interesting to see if there is any sort of pattern along geographic/circulation/editorial stance lines. But I ain't gonna do that. That's why God made grad students.

Many of us faced the graphic photos question again yesterday. There aren't many front pages available yet. They'll all be up at the Newseum soon. So head on over there if you want, I'm sleepin'. Here are a few that are out.

The NYT and the Freep ran the photo of the bodies strung up on the bridge on the front.

The Washington Post went with an even more graphic image. Photo editor Michael duCille said: "I'm draconian. I say: Run it when you have a situation of such magnitude and such importance with American lives at stake in a war zone. People need to see the reality of this war."

The Dallas Morning News ran a milder photo out front and the bridge photo black and white inside, with a warning on A1 about the inside photo.

The Charlotte Observer (no page yet) ran the bridge photo and a note from editor Jennie Buckner.

While our usual policy is not to run graphic photos, we made an exception in this case because of the importance of the story. We don't seek to shock readers, but we also don't want to overly sanitize the harsh realities of this war.

Editor John S. Carroll said that after considerable debate, "we decided not to use one of the grotesque photographs on Page 1. Instead, we chose to convey the nature of the event by means of headlines and a photo that is not so distressing.

"We also decided to run one of the many photos of the bodies inside the paper," he said. This, Carroll added, gave readers a choice about how graphic a portrayal they would see.

>It's not always so simple [Testy Copy Editors]
>Gruesome images: Does taste trump newsworthiness? [Dallas Morning News]
>Media Are Torn Over the Images [Los Angeles Times]