May 3, 2004

THIS ISSUE: AP PHOTO MANAGERS NEWS FROM DARRELL HOEMANN

Readership: Photos can help draw audiences to newspapers

Credibility: Authentic images enhance bonds of trust

Culture: Photo, word, design collaboration brought changes at LA Times

THE PHOTO REPORT PLAYS A KEY ROLE IN READERSHIP
The University of Missouri and the award ceremonies for the Pictures of the Year International competition were the background for the second Midwest seminar of the Associated Press Photo Managers. Organized by Cliff Schiappa of the AP in Kansas City, along with APPM board members Chris Stanfield of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Steve Gonzales of The Kansas City Star, the seminar may have been the largest APPM gathering to date with 60 photo managers, plus students who presented their portfolios.

John Rumbach, co-publisher of The Herald, Jasper, Ind., challenged the gathered photo managers to take a leadership role implementing the results of the The Readership Institute's study. The Herald, with a long history of photojournalism excellence, won first place in Newspaper Picture Editing Portfolio and Best Use of Photographs for newspapers with circulation under 100,000 in this POYi competition. In his view, the impact of the study has been greater and has had more staying power in the three years since its release than any previous research tool, Rumbach said.

While some of the photo managers were familiar with the study, details were unfamiliar to many of those present. Rumbach briefly touched on the eight imperatives identified, and also explained the Readership Behavior Score, or RBS. Summarizing for the photo managers, Rumbach cited Readership Institute Director John Lavine's findings:

• Content really matters.
  
• Readers have a huge appetite for community news and information.
  
• Readers want to know about the lives of ordinary people in our community.
  
• Readers don't feel connected to their newspapers.
  
• Readers perceive newspapers as people-less.
  

Rumbach went on to compare the Readership Institute's findings with an earlier study called "Turning the Tide" which showed similar results in regard to content, citing specifically:

• Readers want stories that touch them through the lives of other local people.
  
• Readers want stories that recognize the 95 percent of the community that commits no crimes, do not play political games and try every day to make some corner of their community a little better. In other words, ordinary people.
  

While the Readership Institute did not set out to gather empirical data on visual content, Rumbach offered that "in theory, reader satisfaction is influenced by all the content in the newspaper -- the words, the pictures, the graphics and the advertising. "Is it possible that when they say they don't feel their newspaper is local, they are talking about both words and pictures?" Rumbach said. He went on to say "It's not only possible, it's likely. But if our visual report is contributing to these negative reader perceptions, it seems it should be able to help turn these perceptions into positives."

Photojournalism, he said, can be part of the local news coverage of ordinary people, can help improve newspaper navigation and can also be part of a constructive employee culture. Because some newsroom editors may see the written story leading the way and visuals illustrating the stories, Rumbach said photo managers need to take the lead in restructuring the visual content without "waiting for someone to tell them what's needed from their departments." The Herald has used photojournalism in six areas to help build readership, Rumbach said, beginning with feature photos from everyday events, such as a kindergarten roundup, a post-game locker room, and a state trooper stepping out of character for a moment during a high school picture day. The kindergarten roundup was an event that some newspapers might see as fluff, but when seen through the lens of the survey results, the families involved see this as a big deal. "They would call it news," he said.

Another way to get the "chicken dinner news" in the newspaper is the photo column, such as the one created at The Providence (R.I.) Journal by Mary Beth Meehan, he said. Meehan would find a topic or an event, research it, then shoot a storytelling photo and write a short story. Another effort at The Herald is searching for "untold stories." Two years ago, the newspaper started a question and answer column featuring local high school students. The column is then packaged with an image from a real moment, he said, not a portrait. But readers don't want "fluff" all the time, he said, "They also want deep local coverage." The Herald did a series on the growth of methamphetamine production, telling the story through its effects on users and local people. The newspaper also did a story about weddings, focusing on one couple, who like many others in their county, rented a hall, served fried chicken and ham, opened kegs and did the chicken dance. Rumbach said this story and others like it are part of each community's "master narrative" according to Chris Peck, editor of The Commercial Appeal of Memphis, Tenn. Other stories in the "master narrative" included a first communion, and a pre-Fourth of July essay on how local people display flags. They also did a story in serial format about a man who was told by his doctor he would die if he didn't lose weight. Readers didn't know the outcome until the last installment of the series.

Rumbach also noted that the survey said "that newspapers with a higher level of staff-written stories did not have high satisfaction levels." This led him to ask the visual managers to consider that content can be more important than who took the photo. This means if readers find content of interest to them, "we could use alternate resources, like AP, to free up staff time," he suggested.

With two full-time photographers and an intern, The Herald uses these ingredients, he said, to produce stories and keep up with a daily report:

• The Herald staff, from top management down, wants to do this.
  
• It weighs realities of staff and time against priorities. Priorities for staff are the front page, picture stories, sports, the local section and then all the rest.
  
• Work smart. "We have never, ever freed up a photographer to work exclusively on a single story," Rumbach said. "So, and this is difficult, you can't have a photographer shooting a story wall-to-wall for months, even though many of our stories take upwards of six months and longer to complete. Photojournalists have to think like journalists. They have to do research, figure out what the story is and which pictures are needed to tell the story. And then go after those pictures."
  
• Planning and communication are key.
  
• Words and pictures should be on equal footing, but teamwork is more important.
  

Summarizing their report, Rumbach said "The more and the better you cover your own community through quality photojournalism, the more you build connections with readers. And that's a key in raising reader satisfaction."

IMPORTANT CONTEST NOTICE: The Associated Press Managing Editors has revised its 2004 contest cycle. These will be key dates for the Freedom of Information, Public Service, Online Convergence and International Perspective Awards: May 31 - Contest period ends June 1 - Postal deadline for sending entries June 7 - Entries must be received at APME offices in New York This action is due to AP's scheduled headquarters move in July. APME's offices are part of that move. We regret any inconvenience.

PHOTOGRAPHS CAN BE KEY TO BUILDING CREDIBILITY WITH PUBLIC
Journalistic credibility, always suspect by some viewers, has been challenged again in the last three months, and Ken Irby, visual journalism group leader at the Poynter Institute, led a discussion about the visual ethics editors face daily. Irby began by leading photo managers through examples of the last year, including The New York Times photographer who was caught staging a photo and a Los Angeles Times photographer who used Photoshop to combine two Iraq photos for better composition. While the Iraq image was done well enough that photo editors in several metro publications ran it as a lead, viewers noted discrepancies and called it to the editor's attention. "This tells us that people do scrutinize photos at a very detailed level," he said.

Photoshop is not the enemy, Irby said, showing examples of pre-digital photography "enhanced" with airbrushing. The objective of an ethics policy, he summarized should be "maximizing truth-telling and minimizing harm." Part of a newspaper's role should be the faithful depiction and preservation of the historical record of the community, he said. Some of the confusion might stem from the photojournalism culture as he cited the illustration categories of news photography competitions. Illustrations can confuse readers, as Irby described his own daughter's questions about the ad that used the image of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speaking to an empty space around the reflecting pool at the Lincoln Memorial.

More credibility damage has occurred as unauthorized use of historical Jane Fonda/John Kerry photos have circulated on the Internet and confused even mainstream media organizations. Demonstrating the cumulative effect of credibility, Irby showed an image from an air show of two planes flying together and asked the gathered visual professionals for a judgment. There was some timid support of the image being authentic, a significant group found "problems" that led them to conclude the image was fake. There was nothing wrong with the image, Irby said.

The recent images of the burned bodies of American contract workers hanging from a bridge in Fallujah, Iraq, created problems with taste and ethics, Irby said, and caused many publications to take time to think about their guidelines and how decisions are made. Irby consulted with several publications that day as editors thought through how they were going to present the images. "How do we do this while being sensitive to the fact that we are going to disturb some people?" he said. A sampling of how publications dealt with the images showed a great variety of methods. Some papers used the more gruesome images on their front pages, while others used less controversial photos on the covers and the tougher images on inside pages in black and white. Several such as the Dallas newspapers used a readers warning and The Oregonian of Portland, Ore., used a readers warning in red type. Irby said this may allow readers to see journalists as human beings first. The Arizona Republic of Phoenix used an image of a burning body, and had little outcry, Irby said.

Newspapers need to develop a collaborative method when dealing with controversial images, Irby suggested, and offered a sample list of questions developed by the Poynter Institute. Included are questions defining the stakeholders -- those affected by the decision; consideration of the possible consequences in the short and long term; and "Can I clearly and fully justify my thinking and my decision? To my colleagues? To the stakeholders? To the public? To myself? Just to have it first doesn't make it right," Irby said. "Readers respond when we sometimes show some restraint."

HOW COLLABORATION HAS CHANGED THE CULTURE AT THE LOS ANGELES TIMES
Photo editors, designers and word editors have learned to work together at the Los Angeles Times, Alan Hagman, senior photo editor said. When he left school years ago The Times was one of several newspapers he never planned to work for because of the newspaper's word-driven design. Decades later Hagman was in Columbia, Mo., to accept top editing awards in the Picture of the Year International competition for Newspaper Multiple Page News Story, Newspaper Series, Picture Editing Portfolio, Best Use of Photography and the Angus McDougall Overall Excellence in Editing Award.

The coverage in Iraq when the war began is an example of the cooperation, Hagman said, describing gatherings of a designer, the A1 picture editor and the executive editor as they matched the right images with the right stories. The push for excellence didn't end as presses rolled with the first edition, with the editing team continuing to make changes in design and picture choice through each edition to the final re-plate at 11 p.m. The collaboration also comes when designers ask for options. Picture editors, Hagman said, discovered that photographers often didn't shoot enough verticals, adding that the designers were not just seeking options in shapes, but also in emotions and tones. He noted that some of the best work came from photographers who also acted as reporters, observing that "photo taking the lead (on a story) is really a good thing when you can do that."

In addition to the continuing war coverage, the same collaborative efforts were applied to the wildfires that ravaged southern California last year, as well as the California governor recall. One ambitious project the team pulled together were photos of each of over 100 candidates who filed for the recall election, even the eccentric who didn't agree to a photo until the last moment when the section had been designed.

One concern Hagman has is the new technology which can mean a loss of face time with staff members who transmit images from coffee shops, cell phones or their home at the end of the day. Collaboration, communication and teamwork were the keys to their success, he said.

Darrell Hoemann, photo/graphics editor of The News-Gazette in Champaign, Ill., wrote today's report.

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