Charles Apple

Did you use a photo of the Iranian missiles being test fired in today’s paper?

How many missiles are in the photo? Three? Or four?

I hope it was the version with three. The version with four missiles — distributed Wednesday by Agence France-Presse — has been proven a Photoshop phraud, according to the Little Green Footballs blog:

Mike Nizza and Patrick Witty of the New York Times‘ The Lede blog write:

For its part, Agence France-Presse retracted its four-missile version this morning, saying that the image was “apparently digitally altered” by Iranian state media. The fourth missile “has apparently been added in digital retouch to cover a grounded missile that may have failed during the test,” the agency said…

Along with major doubts about the image, American intelligence officials had larger questions on exactly how many missiles were fired. One defense official said that “at least 7, and possibly up to 10″ had taken flight in all, though the intelligence data was still being sorted out.

Unfortunately, (left to right) the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe and the L.A. Times used the doctored photo on today’s A1. The Washington Post (far right) used the correct one.

Among the other papers using the AFP image today: The Albany Times Union, the Dallas Quick, the Denver Post, the Fresno Bee, the Houston Chronicle, the Palm Beach Post, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, and the Seattle Times.

In addition, the Baltimore Sun used the doctored image but cropped it so that only three missiles showed. However, one of the missiles shown was the one added.

I found 26 papers at the Newseum using either an unaltered image or another shot entirely of an Iranian missile test. Several more used no art at all or used a graphic to illustrate the story.

The Virginian-Pilot (left) used a photo of a single missile, pairing it with a MCT map showing the range of the missile. Perhaps the nicest treatment of the day was by the Richmond Times-Dispatch (right):

Read about the whole thing in the NYT’s Lede blog. Agence France-Presse moved a nice article today about the debacle. Find an LAT piece here. Find Editor & Publisher’s edited and published piece here.

Meanwhile, Little Green Footballs is turning blue in the face for not getting their due for being the first to uncover the pixelpushing.

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A similar story unfolded today on the electronic front. The AP reports:

The Associated Press and video services operated by CBS and NBC have pulled video allegedly taken of a tornado in Nebraska last weekend after questions were raised about its authenticity.

A tornado chaser has claimed that the video was a doctored version of pictures he had taken of a twister that touched down four years ago in Rock, Kan.

Read all about it here.

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And, in other news, the New York Post had no trouble teasing to the Jesse Jackson/Barack Obama story inside:

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The High Plains Daily Leader, a brand-new, 7,000-circulation p.m. daily in Liberal, Kansas, has changed its A1 format.

Its first edition from May 4 is on the left. On the right is the Monday, May 12 front:

Some of you are applauding (I hope). Others are wondering: What’s the big deal?

A brief recap:

1) Corporate wanks of Lancaster Management Inc. knock back The Daily Times of Liberal, Kansas, from daily publication to printing only three times a week.

2) Earl Watt, the colorful editor/publisher of The Times, walks off the job to start his own paper. Most of his staff follows him.

3) AP writes about the effort. We blog about it.

4) A kind staffer sends us a front page jpeg of the first edition. And that’s when we find that the new paper — The High Plains Daily Leader — has pretty much ripped off the look and feel of the Alan Jacobson-designed Idaho State Journal of Pocatello, Idaho.

Much grousing and gnashing of teeth — especially my own — follows.

5) Larry Phillips, the managing editor of The Daily Leader, posts a comment to this blog claiming visual plagiarism isn’t really plagiarism:

Theft is the greatest form of flattery… always has been, always will be. There is no law against that.

6) More tooth enamel cracks. More comments are posted.

So today:

7) Tina Bridenstine, our plucky correspondent from the Daily Leader — and to whom I definitely owe multiple beers for dragging her into this whole mess — e-mails us again. On the record, even.

She writes:

The publisher was concerned when he saw the reactions people had to the first front page, so he changed the design around. I’m sure he’ll play with it more in the future, but for now, my editor (Larry) asked me to e-mail you the jpeg of the front page as it looks currently.

Thanks,
Tina

No, no, Tina. Thank you! And again: Our best wishes to you, Earl, Larry and the whole staff there at the Daily Leader.

I disliked very much finding another newspaper’s design had been copied for the first Daily Leader editions. I disliked even more the way the ensuing conversation developed. (And you should see some of the comments I did not allow to be posted here!)

What I regret most of all, though, is the way this little shortcut took away from what my original intent was in the first place for writing about the new paper: What this staff is going through; the sacrifices they’re making for their readers is astounding.

I hope like crazy The Daily Leader develops into a huge success.

The newspaper readers of Liberal, Kansas, deserve it.

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Two folks have pointed this out:

On the left is the State Journal of Pocatello, Idaho, as redesigned two years ago by Alan Jacobson. Circulation: 17,000.

On the right is the High Plains Daily Leader of Liberal, Kansas, which we’ve written about twice in the past two days.

My comment: *Heavy sigh.*

For a larger look, tickle the thumbnail.

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UPDATE

Please enjoy reading the comments to this post and then check out the latest here. 

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A while back I discovered, quite by accident, that the Wikipedia contains an entry for brilliant Dallas Morning News editor Nicole Stockdale. For many years, she blogged at A Capital Idea. She tapered off about a year ago. I miss reading her stuff very much.

Anyway, Here’s a portion of her Wikipedia page:

Very interesting, right?

But scroll down a bit further and you’ll find careful attribution of vital facts about Nicole.

That’s right:

Use Wikipedia for your personal amusement. Have fun with it. But don’t rely on it for anything you plan to publish. You never know where that information is coming from!

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Oh, brother, am I getting tired of this subject…

On the left is last month’s issue of The New Republic. On the right, the new issue of Time magazine:

Naturally, the editors at The New Republic got all snotty about it:

We don’t want to say that this week’s cover of Time is a rip-off of our HillarAck cover that came out last month, but–oh, whatever–they totally ripped us off! All the way on down to the cover line, too: “There Can Only Be One” vs. “We Have To Choose One.”

Now, see here. Composite faces are nothing new. They’ve been around for years. And that headline? Ever heard of a little movie/TV show called The Highlander?

But then along comes Mixed Media columnist Jeff Bercovici of Condé Nast Portolio to set everyone straight:

Time’s managing editor, Rick Stengel, says TNR has no cause for complaint:

If those wonderfully wonky folks at TNR (and I used to be one of them) watched a little more of the NBA, they would realize that the inspiration for this week’s cover was the striking ad campaign the NBA is using for the playoffs.

In fact, we say so on the magazine’s index page. And in what is certainly a first, the NBA is doing a little cross-promotion with us on the cover.

The New Republic’s editors responded by updating their blog post:

UPDATE: Time’s cover is derivative (not just of us).

As someone commented at Portfolio:

Just give it a rest, guys.

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A couple of photojournalistic controversies were in full-blown fury by the end of the week.

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Controversy No. 1: The Case of the Rampant Photoshopper

Carrie Niland, a photo editor with the Seattle Times, recently discovered a photographic deception involving a former intern.

Niland writes in her blog that the photo…

…recently ran in a national photo magazine. While talking to one of our younger photographers about the toning and light in the photograph, we happened to do an archive search and discovered the former intern shot the picture during his internship for the paper.

Here’s what won a College Photographer of the Year award in 2005 and appeared in a Photo District News magazine article last month citing the former intern as one of the top 30 photographers under the age of 30:

Here’s how the photo appears in the Seattle Times‘ archive and how it looked in the paper when it ran in 2005:

Niland writes:

We discovered the toning/copyright issue when talking to a younger photographer who was curious about limits and what is allowed and what isn’t.

If one of our photographers turned a photo like this in while shooting for us, there would be severe consequences. But yet photojournalists are doing it all over the world and being rewarded for their work. This photographer received national attention—both by placing in CPOY and then in PDN with this photograph.

What message does this send to photographers that are doing good work that is honest and straight-up? And how do we help photographers think about what they are trying to say with a picture IN the camera and not afterwards using a computer?

And she adds, in a later post:

This picture was shot for a newspaper, and is owned by that newspaper. I see no logical, ethical reason for it to be altered. Not for a contest (either CPOY or PDN)…

I am not saying that dodging and burning shouldn’t be done. But I think this picture goes beyond “burning the edges down to take away from distracting features” that the photographer claims.

See more work by this former intern here.

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Brouhaha No. 2: The Case of the Surly Iwo Vets

The Business & Media Institute — an apparently politically conservative web site — reported this week about World War II vets who are offended at this week’s Time magazine cover.

Time abandoned its red-edged design motif for only the second time in 85 years to present a special issue on global warming:

TB&MI’s Jeff Poor reports:

Donald Mates, an Iwo Jima veteran, told the Business & Media Institute on April 17 that using that photograph for that cause was a “disgrace.”

“It’s an absolute disgrace,” Mates said. “Whoever did it is going to hell. That’s a mortal sin. God forbid he runs into a Marine that was an Iwo Jima survivor.”

The man who led the platoon that raised the flag over Iwo Jima’s Mt. Suribachi in February 1945 — Keith Wells — wasn’t too damn happy about the Time cover, either:

“That global warming is the biggest joke I’ve ever known,” Wells told the Business & Media Institute. “[W]e’ll stick a dadgum tree up somebody’s rear if they want that and think that’s going to cure something.

The illustration is credited to Arthur Hochstein, the art director for Time. We presume Mr. Hochstein will be on guard for angry octogenarian Iwo Jima survivors who hope to sneak up behind him with trees.

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