Charles Apple

Here’s the cover of the new issue of the Economist magazine:

OK, very good. Very good indeed. The photo is credited to Larry Downing of Reuters.

So why post it here? Because here’s that cover again, side-by-side with the original photo:

Not good. This is lazy design and lazy editing. Not to mention lazy ethics.

Jeremy Peters, the Media Decoder blogger for the New York Times, is all over this today. He writes:

When it comes to its own photographers, Reuters has stringent standards regarding photo editing. “Reuters has a strict policy against modifying, removing, adding to or altering any of its photographs without first obtaining the permission of Reuters and, where necessary, the third parties referred to,” Thomson Reuters said in a statement on Sunday.

Editors from The Economist had no comment when asked on Friday about the cover image.

Read it here.

Thanks to Greg Mitchell for blogging this today.

Fred Matamoros has left the Tacoma, Wash., News Tribune in order to join SB Magazine, a city magazine that covers Shreveport and Bossier City, La.

Fred will be SB Magazine’s creative director starting Monday. His last day at the News Tribune was a week ago today, he tells us.

Fred writes:

The family is very excited about the move. It’s sort of a return home. My wife was born there, as was our daughter. I worked at the Times in Shreveport in the early nineties.

A 1985 graduate of Woodbury University in Burbank, Calif., Fred spent four years as a designer and art director for a major L.A. ad agency before becoming a staff artist for the Daily Breeze in Torrance, Calif. He spent three years as assistant graphics editor of the Shreveport (La.) Times and five-and-a-half years as graphics editor of the Olympian in Olymbia, Wash., before moving up the road to Tacoma in 1999 as an artist and illustrator.

A few samples of Fred’s work:

Find more on his personal web site.

Fred writes:

If you can, please let our many friends know that the News Tribune is searching for a newsroom artist.

Find the want ad here.

Nor is he real damn fond of Outside magazine at the moment.

As far as we can reconstruct, here’s what happened…

1. Outside prepares a cover story on champion cyclist Lance Armstrong. They shoot him for the cover wearing a plain blue T-shirt.

2. At some point, the editors have a cute saying Photoshopped onto the shirt:

Amusing, perhaps. But not to Lance.

3. Lance tweets:

4. The whole thing goes viral — most notably at the Huffington Post.

5. Outside responds with a little tag beneath the cover image on its web site:

Funny stuff. And not to excuse this — because I, too, hate bullshit with Photoshop when it’s not obviously a photoillustration…

But come on, bicycle dude. This stuff is done all the time in magazines. That doesn’t make it right. But it is pretty common.

(Read about that Washingtonian example here.)

(Read about that example from Newsweek here.)

(Read about that one — and several more like it — here.)

My advice, Lance: Next time, opt to give your exclusive interview to a newspaper.

Thanks to Michael King of the Green Bay Press-Gazette for the tip.