Posted on: Sunday, July 29, 2001

After Deadline
Use of old photos not without pitfalls

By John Simonds
Advertiser Reader Representative

Using old pictures to illustrate new stories is an accepted newspaper practice that is handled with care. File photos help inform readers and brighten pages, but each has its own tests of time and meaning.

Newspapers today are extra-sensitive to the original context in which file photos appeared. The Advertiser includes above each caption of a published library photo the date on which the picture was shot or filed, an important truth-in-labeling detail that's part of being diligent, accurate and fair.

The Advertiser news library maintains alphabetized envelope files of glossy photos from earlier years, but increasingly, electronic archiving allows editors and page designers to call specific photo images onto their screens by typing the subject words under which pictures are filed.

Page designers are pivotal members of the team that creates each page of The Advertiser. Getting photos or graphics to illustrate an article is a part of the page designer's job in laying out and brightening a page. Reporters write the text of articles. Section editors, copy editors and other editors edit them. Copy editors usually write the headlines for articles and captions for the photos.

(Newsroom people may assume others recognize the division of labor involved in assembling page content, but callers often seem surprised, for example, to hear that reporters do not write headlines or photo captions.)

When things go well, pages greet readers with the look of seamless coordination, everything in place, crisp headlines, pictures that add to stories and captions that relate graphic images to nearby stories. That's the case in a great majority of pages in The Advertiser.

An exception occurred in The Advertiser of Sunday, July 8, when a previously published June 1999 Kaua'i beach photo was chosen from the electronic archives to illustrate a story about a Lana'i beach. The two-column photo showed the wreckage of a ship in shallow water. A caption writer compounded the photo choice by writing that the wreckage was visible from the beach.

Unknown to the caption writer, a salvage company had removed the wreckage within six months after the photo first appeared. The Advertiser published a July 20 correction, hours after learning from an informed caller about the error.

File photos can add a useful dimension to a news story for which current photos are not available. But pitfalls lurk if people or objects in the photo have changed in serious ways, or if a file photo clashes with, or is unrelated to, issues raised in an article.

The Advertiser's page designers and editors take pains in choosing photos and illustrations and in proofing captions. Horror stories from elsewhere illustrate the potential problem. Almost every editor has a memory file of examples from other newspapers: the photo of an identifiable wrecked auto in which a young person had been killed (alcohol not a factor) used to illustrate pre-holiday articles about drunken driving; a photo of a plane from one airline illustrating a story about an investigation into a crash of a similar-model plane belonging to another airline; photos of identifiable young people illustrating news reports on unrelated teen misbehavior.

The recent shipwreck photo experience has reaffirmed the need for editors, page designers and copy editors to pay even closer attention to the content of library photos, whether the images are pulled onto screens or scanned from glossy files.

Page designers play a greater role in newspapers today, and The Advertiser has a dozen of them assigned to various sections of the newspaper and working under the presentation editor, who emphasizes journalistic standards in choosing illustrations. Care with captions remains a critical priority among copy editors, who work under the news editor.

A page problem of a different kind left a headline and photo off of a Monday, July 23, feature page. A production glitch involving human error in the computerized pagination process omitted the headline and the picture, a lapse that escaped internal monitoring. As a result, the production department has added a more formal proofing step to its busy page-making process.

And many thanks to all the alert early Friday callers who caught the site error in a one-column map showing where a proposed Makiki housing project would be built. The Advertiser fixed the map for the PM edition.