This morning I got a letter from William Schmidt, deputy managing editor of the NYT. My hand trembled as I opened the envelope. (there was no envelope) Maybe the “Weekender” is coming in a new Coach Edition with matching leather gloves for smudge free reading?
TO: ALL FREELANCE PHOTOGRAPHERS
This is a reminder of The Times’s policies on digital manipulation or other alteration of photos.
As you know, under the contract you signed for The Times, you warrant that any photo submitted for publication “will be original and unaltered (unless it is a photo illustration, pre-approved by your editor and fully disclosed in caption information materials).”
The Times takes this obligation very seriously; the integrity of photographs and other material we publish goes to the heart of our credibility as a news organization. The prohibition on unauthorized alteration of photos applies to all sections of the paper, the Magazine and the Web site.
This passage from the newsroom’s “Guidelines on Our Integrity” explains our rules in more detail:
Photography and Images. Images in our pages, in the paper or on the Web, that purport to depict reality must be genuine in every way. No people or objects may be added, rearranged, reversed, distorted or removed from a scene (except for the recognized practice of cropping to omit extraneous outer portions). Adjustments of color or gray scale should be limited to those minimally necessary for clear and accurate reproduction, analogous to the “burning” and “dodging” that formerly took place in darkroom processing of images. Pictures of news situations must not be posed.
In some sections, and in magazines, where a photograph is used to serve the same purposes as a commissioned drawing or painting – as an illustration of an idea or situation or as a demonstration of how a device works, etc. – it must always be clearly labeled as a photo illustration. This does not apply to portraits or still-lifes (photos of food, shoes, etc.), but it does apply to other kinds of shots in which we have artificially arranged people or things, as well as to collages, montages, and photographs that have been digitally altered.
If you have any questions about what is permissible under the rules, please consult the assigning editor.
Sincerely,
William E. Schmidt
Deputy Managing Editor
The New York Times Newspaper
Division of The New York Times Company
The gloves will have to wait. But they have come off. Obviously some battening down of hatches is going on after the Edgar Martins débâcle. It is to be expected. It is also the first time I have ever gotten any official direction in writing with respect to “a policy” on alteration…well corporate communication is always an oxymoron. I did know what was permissible out of common sense. You wonder who doesn’t? As for that bit about consulting your editor if you have a question, well, in my experience Photoshop is most useful to them as a box to make the monitor higher. Raw converters, high radius sharpening, LAB colour, moire, curves vs. levels, shadow-highlight, none of this is going to get you more than a wha? Honestly, it is not their job to understand digital capture technology or be digital referees. Their job is to understand pictures and make intelligent assignments. They do this very well.
Part of the reason I was approached by the Times to do work for them was that I was outside of the newspaper world. I had not cut my teeth on newspapers, I did not go to J-school, I had never shot a grin and grab nor a high school soccer game. I don’t have that memory bank of solutions to photo problems that go through a 24mm lens close to the subject if you know what I mean. Which is not to disparage what journalists have to do. There are necessary limits implied by the mandate, I will get back to that.
My development in photography had come totally through editorial magazine work, and the editors that were calling were also veterans of that world. Their learning curve was steep also. While some may have had experience on newsmagazines or financial reporting, none had significant newspaper backgrounds. But the sections I was being assigned to were not “news” sections, it was feature fare like Dining, Arts, Style. I was not being asked to “report” on anything. I still got chastised early and often however for my scant captions. I figured the less I said the better. I did not want the responsibility of reporting, since I am not trained. My mandate is to take the intelligent handoff from an editor and make good pictures in my style. That’s what they wanted me for. Which is not reporting, probably not journalism, and may or may not be reality either. By the standards above, almost everything I was assigned was a photo-illustration, in that I directed people, moved furniture and generally futzed around until I got the photograph that I wanted, whether it was a portrait, a still life or interior. This is standard editorial practice.
In some sections, and in magazines, where a photograph is used to serve the same purposes as a commissioned drawing or painting – as an illustration of an idea or situation or as a demonstration of how a device works, etc. – it must always be clearly labeled as a photo illustration. This does not apply to portraits or still-lifes (photos of food, shoes, etc.), but it does apply to other kinds of shots in which we have artificially arranged people or things, as well as to collages, montages, and photographs that have been digitally altered.
“Illustrations of ideas or situations” might encompass any situation where I was present and made choices about photographing a person or group. But portraits and still life gets a pass evidently, unless the “people or thing” is “artificially arranged”, which takes me back in a circle to almost all portraits and all still life. I am no clearer after this clarification. (secret answer: there may be no answer to this for newspapers, read on…)
Tangential to that, (going somewhere, I promise) my cable provider has seen fit to scramble the location of the channels, I now have C-Span and NY-1 in the low digits. I am enjoying the Wendy Williams show for the first time. How You Doing? Fine, thank you, and getting up early on Sunday mornings for my long runs means that I get back around 10am, just in time for Richard D. Heffner’s excellent program “An Open Mind” broadcast from SUNY somewhere upstate, NY. For the last two weeks he has been interviewing Alex S. Jones, an authority on media issues, Pulitzer Prize winner and former New York Times staffer through much of the eighties. He has a new book out called “Losing the News” “The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy.” Here is an excerpt from chapter one, “The Iron Core”:
Imagine a sphere of pitted iron, grey and imperfect like a large cannonball. Think of this dense, heavy ball as the total mass of each day’s serious reported news, the iron core of information that is at the center of a functioning democracy. This iron core is big and unwieldy, reflecting each day’s combined output of all the professional journalism done by news organizations — newspapers, radio and television news, news services such as the Associated Press and Reuters, and a few magazines. Some of its content is now created by new media, nonprofits, and even, occasionally, the supermarket tabloids, but the overwhelming majority still comes from the traditional news media.
This iron core does not include Paris Hilton’s latest escapade or an account of the Yankees game or the U.S. Open. It has no comics or crossword puzzle. No ads. It has no stories of puppies or weekend getaways or recipes for cooking great chili. Nor does it include advice on buying real estate, investing in an IRA, movie reviews, or diet advice. There is nothing wrong with any of these things. Indeed, pleasant and diverting stories are far more appealing to most people than the contents of the core, which some find grim, boring, or riddled with bias.
It has no editorials and does not include the opinions of columnists or op-ed writers or political bloggers. These things are derived from the core. They are made possible because there is a core. Their point of departure is almost always information gleaned from the reporting that gives the core its weight, and they serve to spread awareness of the information that is in the core, to analyze it and interpret it and challenge it. Opinion writers pick and choose among what the core provides to find facts that will further an argument or advance a policy agenda. But they are outside the core, because they almost always offer commentary and personal observation, not original reporting.
Inside the core is news from abroad, from coverage of the war in Iraq to articles describing the effort to save national parks in Mozambique. There is news of politics, from the White House to the mayor’s office. There is an account of a public hearing on a proposal to build new ball fields and an explanation of a regional zoning concept that might affect property values. There is policy news about Medicare reform and science news about global warming. There is news of business, both innovation and scandal, and even sporting news of such things as the abuse of steroids. An account of the battle within the local school board about dress codes is there, along with the debate in the state legislature over whether intelligent design should be taught as science. The iron sphere is given extra weight by investigative reports ranging from revelations that prisoners at the county jail are being used to paint the sheriff’s house to the disclosure that the government is tapping phones without warrants as part of the war on terror.
Alex feels we are eroding this Core, and are at risk of losing it altogether. The core cannot be maintained in any type of “free” way. Basic reporting is like digging ditches, rarely any glamour involved, you are not going to get an intern to go to Afghanistan for free to do this. It requires resources and commitment over the long haul. Notice also the distinction he makes between original reporting and opinion and analysis. Without the core, you cannot have the rest.
…So I get this email this morning reminding us all about the standards and practices involved and it makes me think-how do you square this circle? In other words, in trying to create a product more interesting to more people newspapers have enlarged the scope of their coverage well beyond the confines of the iron core that Alex talks about. Tthey have done this for a long time, except with staff photographers. Lately they have seen fit to hire outside the choir you could say. Which gets you Edgar Martins, an art star who has no connection to print and obviously no concern. Or it gets you Nadav Kander, (who I love) and a set of completely manipulated portraits that passes muster because as I read above, portraits and still life can be called photographs, except when they are photo illustrations. So is it not a photo illustration to completely change and insert a background? The Magazine, the website and the Newspaper all have to adhere to the same standard according to the letter above. If I am confused, imagine the lay reader.
Newspapers seem to be trying to have their cake and eat it too. The mandate to create compelling (which you can also read as trendy, fashionable, provocative) content may not always coincide with the mandate to report facts. When you start to mix up this iron core with sections from Agronomy to Zymurgy, (just leave my astrology thank you!) when you start to look outside the J-schools and newspaper ranks for editors and creatives, and when the pressure of the bottom line starts to pinch, then you get mission “creep”. Profit and ambition can compromise integrity, and the reader loses faith in the core itself. News becomes confused with info-tainment. Reporting start to look less like truth and more like the opinion of the newspaper owner.
We now are awash in opinion, mine included. I have no solution here but wanted to draw attention to Jones’ writing and his “core” idea. I believe that accountability reporting as he calls it is essential to our democracy. You are not watching your city council, but you know someone is. Dutifully, so that one day there is a paper trail, and a story can emerge of corruption or improvement. Technologists like to posit that the camera phone, the citizen journalist and the very transparency of information on the internet can provide what newspapers currently provide. But you cannot expect bloggers to be able to withstand the lawsuits that even a simple investigative piece could generate. Certainly that lone blogger could “tweet” for help but this is a naive fantasy. I heard Eric Schmidt of Google gush that the simplicity of fact checking on the internet means that politicians will have a harder time lying in public. Guess he has not tuned into C-Span lately. Maybe he needs to rescan his converter box to make sure he is getting all the channels…
A whole post and I only mentioned running once.
actually you mentioned running twice… Thanks for this post,, most interesting. I’ll have to look out for Mr Jones book
| A whole post and I only mentioned running once.
Good to see it. You have an interesting voice on photography. Don’t abandon it.