Charles Apple

Greetings, folks, and welcome to our second post of the day critiquing newspaper front pages from the U.S. and around the world, as posted at the Newseum.

Earlier, I posted my penultimate look at Vancouver Olympics pages from the U.S. and Canada. This time, I’ll take a spin through pages focusing on Saturday’s giant earthquake in Chile. We’ll look at U.S. papers first and then open to look at Latin American papers.

And, as usual, we’ll be looking at only the best or most notable pages, or pages from which I feel I can extract a lesson for us all.

I’ll start right here in Hampton Roads, Va. — with the Virginian-Pilot of Norfolk, circulation 164,454. This picture by David Lillo of the Associated Press was perhaps the most commonly used as lead art by U.S. papers today:

And no wonder. It’s an awesome photo. You or I could easily have been in any one of those cars, atop the viaduct when the quake struck.

While this isn’t the best page the Virginian-Pilot has ever designed, you can see all the hallmarks of what makes the Pilot a great visual paper. A big, bold headline tells us just what we need to know. The photo is just perfect — especially for a place that has more than its share of bridges. Three nice pullout boxes cover the main questions on our minds, even comparing this event to the one in Haiti.

The same photo was used by the Times-Dispatch of Richmond, Va. The design may have been less intricate, but the impact was just as powerful:

I like the fact that Richmond got the Hawaii angle into the headline. The Pilot, of course, had done that with a two-column picture and a pullout box.

The Times-Dispatch circulates 133,161 copies daily.

This does bring up that interesting phenomenon I’ve written about from time to time, that of Regional Twins: When two papers, in roughly the same geographical area. choose the same picture and crop it nearly the same way.

Let’s be honest; most readers don’t really care what a newspaper published a couple of hundred miles away looks like today. But when a potential customer walks up to a set of news racks — or into a convenience store — and sees twins like this, displayed side-by-side… well, I wonder what she thinks.

There’s not much we can do about it. It’s just one of those things that pops up, from time to time — especially when we have access to the same wire photos and have roughly the same deadlines.

Just a little further up the road — in Washington, D.C. — the Washington Post used a different photo of that same scene:

The picture by Marco Iredes of Reuters is played well, across four columns. In particular, though, I love the little graphic down below the locator map:

Nice work by the Post’s Nathaniel Vaughn Kelso and Patterson Clark. Average daily circulation for the Post is 582,844.

The Buffalo News is one of the better papers in the country at using photography well, and that certainly applies to wire art. The News built today’s A1 around a nice Reuters shot of yet again, that same scene in Chile:

Very clean, of course — as is the custom in Buffalo. The News circulates 165,511 copies daily.

Now, compare that page to this one by the Tri City Herald of Kennewick, Wash., circulation 40,830:

The Herald doesn’t have quite the impact as did Buffalo, did it? Yet, the Herald used very clean design and some nice pull-out decks. So what went wrong?

The cropping. While the AP photo selected by the Herald suggests scope — there’s a lot of space around the subject matter at the center of the picture — it doesn’t really show us anything more. This picture could have been cropped in much tighter to accentuate the carnage we see there.

To some extent, I feel the same way about this AP picture used by the Press-Enterprise of Riverside, Calif.:

It’s jarring to see the broken bridge and the vehicles strewn across the road as if they were Hot Wheels. But in the foreground is some broken concrete and a couple of downed signs. Nothing nearly as compelling as the stuff back there on the bridge.

So why not crop in tight on the compelling stuff? Or, better yet, select another photo that tells a better visual story? Like the photos we’ve already seen, for example.

The Press-Enterprise circulates 113,182 copies daily.

This was one of the more compelling angles I saw today, on the front of the Seattle Times:

The main art is downright scary. Again, just think of how many times you drive across bridges. The secondary picture and the bullet-like decks below the fabulous headline make it all come together. Average daily circulation for the Times is 263,588.

I’m a little confused about the origin of that main art, however. The Times says it’s from the Associated Press. But the Star Tribune of Minneapolis, Minn., says it’s by Martin Bernetti of Getty Images:

Nice work by the Strib, which circulates 304,543 copies daily.

A moment ago, I mentioned scale. When things like this happen, it’s always good to find a photo that helps us grasp the enormity of the event.

The Star of Ventura, Calif. — circulation 86,276 — found a picture that did just that and it ran it huge across page one today:

There’s something about all that steel rebar that seems… ominous. Wonderful photo by Carlos Espinoza of the Associated Press.

Espinoza also shot the picture used by the Orange County Register of Santa Ana, Calif. What it loses in the innards of the concrete bridge, it gains in the rows of spilled autos:

The Orange County Register circulates 212,293 copies daily.

The other picture I found on many, many U.S. papers today was this apartment building in Concepción, snapped in half by the earthquake:

The News Tribune of Duluth, Minn. — circulation 40,305 — gave a great ride today to this photo from the Associated Press. I had difficulty finding a paper that actually named the photographer, however, If anyone can find it for me, please let me know and I’ll update this post.

The Observer of Charlotte, N.C. — circulation 167,585 — also used this photo six columns wide…

…and it’s beautiful, of course. But it also brings up more than just Regional Twins. These are Regional Quadruplets:

In addition to the Observer, you’re seeing the Greensboro News & Record (circulation 84,339), the Winston-Salem Journal (circulation 81,930) and the Asheville Citizen-Times (circulation 50,160).

Winston-Salem shrank the photo to four-and-a-half columns in order to put a quake story alongside. Greensboro and Asheville took it down in order to push another story above the fold. Yet, the only treatment I’d question here is Asheville’s, which sliced off quite a bit from the sides of the picture in order to make it more square.

And leave it to the Mercury News of San Jose, Calif., to find — and to use to great effect — a fresh angle of the same scene everyone else was running on A1:

That’s a picture of the same apartment, by Rafael Vallejos of EPA. And that simple, simple headline — aimed at a readership that certainly knows its earthquakes — is wonderful. Average daily circulation of the Mercury News is 225,175.

A few papers built their front pages around the same picture — by the AP’s Sebastian Martinez — as did the New York Times today:

And, in related news, the New York Times ran a four-column photo from the AP across the top of its Sunday front. Average daily circulation for the NYT is 927,851.

The problem I have with this picture is that it shows no scale. As you’ve seen, buildings were ripped part. Highway bridges were flattened. Hundreds — possibly thousands — of people lost their lives. And while that’s a touching vignette we’re seeing, it seems to miss the bigger story.

The same might be said for the lead art atop today’s Tribune of Salt Lake City, circulation 112,545:

A great picture by Roberto Candia of the Associated Press. But hardly an epic one. Of what is surely an epic story today.

No, if your editors want to go with a touching, people-oriented vignette to tell the story in Chile, perhaps something like this might have been a better choice:

The picture is by Victor Ruiz Caballero of Reuters and, even if you couldn’t read the caption, makes it clear we’re seeing folks who are very lucky not to be under all that debris. You’ll note, of course, that the David Lillo AP picture of the cars lying atop a fallen viaduct makes a wonderful two-column secondary photo.

The paper, of course, is the Bee of Sacramento, Calif., circulation 217,545.

Another great personal vignette photo would have been the AP picture selected by the Sun Herald of Biloxi, Miss., for use out front:

Wow. Powerful stuff, without being alarming. The Sun Herald circulates 44,613 copies daily.

Not long after the quake struck, the word went out to parties all along the Pacific: Be on the lookout for a possible tsunami. Hawaii braced itself, firing off alarms and rousting tourists at daybreak for the expected deluge, just a few hours later.

And then it didn’t happen. The Garden Island of Lihu’e — circulation 9,776 — documented all this with locally-generated stories, an AP graphic and a picture shot by a reporter:

The Advertiser of Honolulu — circulation 113,947 — summed up the relief felt by all islanders with this headline:

The photo — by staffer Andrew Gomes of lifeguards waiting for a surge that never really materialized — was inspired. Nice work.

West Hawaii Today of Kailua Kona — circulation 13,594 — also let out a sharp breath of relief today on behalf of its readers:

The picture — credited to William Ing of Stephens Media — shows water swirling around an inlet and bridge as the tsunami wave nearly washed over the roadbed. Extra water pooled in a nearby parking lot, the caption says.

As soon as the all-clear was given, folks took back to the surf, says the Star Bulletin of Honolulu, circulation 64,305:

What a wonderful poster front.

I have to wonder, though: Eight pages of tsunami coverage? How many pages would the Star Bulletin have produced if there had actually been real tsunami damage?

Now, let’s look through a few Latin American papers. And please keep in mind:

1. I can’t read Spanish — and neither, apparently, can my daughter. If her Spanish grades this semester are an accurate gauge.
2. Many of these papers don’t appear to credit their photographs. Meaning I won’t have identities of photographers.

The only Chilean paper posting to the Newseum today was El Mercurio of Santiago.

And wow, is that an incredibly powerful photo on page one today:

The lead picture is by Juan Carlos Romo — who, I presume, is a staffer for El Mercurio. This man, cradling the head of a deceased family member, is in the city of Talca, northeast of Concepción.

A number of papers ran photos of the collapsed bridge very large today. Here is huge poster play by Diário of Sao Paulo, Brazil:

This time, in Chile, the headline says. The photo is by Marco Fredes of Reuters — who also shot the front of today’s Washington Post.

That same picture was used huge by the Jornal da Tarde; also of Sao Paulo…

…and by Perú.21 in Lima, Peru:

Oh, and thanks so much to Perú.21 for reminding us that this quake happened just before a full moon.

Clarín of Buenos Aires, Argentina, gave wonderful play to this Reuters shot of the same scene:

A Tarde of Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, created perhaps one of the best displays of the day with this nice use of the same David Lillo/Associated Press photo used by Richmond and the Virginian-Pilot:

La Hora of Quito, Ecuador, punched up the drama of its presentation by tilting its picture a bit:

And here is the now-familiar Reuters picture by Marco Fredes, cropped very loosely by El Universal of Caracas, Venezuela:

The impact of El Universal’s presentation is diminished somewhat by the three-column secondary photo of the kids walking down the street. It competes too greatly with the loosely-cropped lead art.

Diário do Alto Tiete of Suzano, Brazil, managed to get up on top of the bridge to shoot a different angle from what we’ve seen elsewhere:

La Nacion of Buenos Aires, Argentina, took its lead photo down to three columns, added a tall, skinny map and augmented all this with three smaller vignette pictures to help show the scope of the tragedy:

It was a nice attempt, but this page really doesn’t share the impact as some of the others we’ve seen today. Perhaps if the lead photo were cropped tighter. Perhaps.

A number of Latin American papers also used pictures of the split-open apartment building. Most of these are the same picture — from the Associated Press — that we saw on the front of Charlotte and Duluth.

Here it is on the front of El Pais of Montevideo, Uruguay…

…O Globo of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil…

…and el Territorio of Posadas, Argentina:

Correio* of Salvador, Brazil, used a Reuters picture by Jose Luis Saavedra, but to equally great effect:

Crítica of Panama used a picture of the apartment but then obscured the bottom half of the picture with body copy and the top of the picture with a gaudy headline:

Not what you should aim to do with powerful news photojournalism, I think.

Dia a Dia — also of Panama — similarly hid part of its AP lead art with a giant text box:

And on the front of Panamá América — also in Panama — we’re treated to a view of folks leisurely strolling along what appears to be broken roads and bike paths:

The photo is used nicely at six columns. But does it really tell us anything — about the destruction and the death — of Santiago or of its people? I don’t think so.

Again, we see this same child or woman helped from the rubble of a Santiago building by rescue workers:

This is Hoy of Managua, Nicaragua — another city that’s known the horrors of shaking earth. And you get the sense that the editors of Hoy know what’s important at times like this: Every living soul.

And while the Samoa Observer of Apia in the Samoan Islands braced for the tsunami it figured to be on the way, its editors, too, used that same photo of a Santiago victim:

A great job, overall — on the part of all newspapers of the Western Hemisphere — covering yet more earthquake tragedy.

See my critiques of papers covering the Haitian earthquake here, here and here.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 28th, 2010 at 10:07 pm and is filed under A look at the day's fronts, International newspapers, News design, Photojournalism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.