AFTER DEADLINE
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By Seth Jones
Advertiser Photo Editor
On any given day, between 40 and 60 photographs will appear in the pages of The Honolulu Advertiser, even more on Sunday.
They will range from the Page 1 centerpiece photo, chosen from either the major breaking news of the day or to illustrate an enterprise story, to thumbnail-sized photos of people in the news.
With a staff of seven photographers, The Advertiser's photo department has its hands full each day just covering the news on O'ahu. Our correspondents and occasionally some free-lancers shoot photos on the Neighbor Islands.
For photos from the Mainland and around the world, we rely on wire services, syndicates and free-lancers.
Many more photos than those appearing in the paper flow into our newsroom each day. The Associated Press, for example, transmits about 1,000 photos on an average day.
Wire photos got started in 1935 when The Associated Press, a cooperative of daily newspapers in the United States, transmitted over telephone lines a picture of a plane crash in upstate New York.
Until the advent of satellite transmission of digital pictures little more than a decade ago, newspapers received about six black-and-white photos an hour, transmitted over what looked like a big fax machine. Back then, we received about 125 photos a day. Today, we can receive more than 100 full-color photos in an hour.
On the busiest news day most of us have ever seen, Sept. 11, 2001, the AP transmitted more than 2,100 photos. Editors on the photo desk at The Advertiser looked at every one of them.
While the AP supplies nearly all of our breaking news and sports photos, we turn to syndicates for many of our feature pictures.
On occasions like 9-11 or the Iraq war, those syndicates provide hundreds of breaking news photos in addition to the AP offerings. During the war, every day we saw the work of more than 50 AP photographers embedded with U.S. troops or otherwise covering the conflict. The syndicates provided the work of several dozen more shooters.
Photos are judged on several factors, primarily news content and reader appeal. We also consider whether an image would be too disturbing to readers because of its content, and we especially think about how children might react to seeing graphic photos in the newspaper.
On Tuesday, we reported that the bodies of 18 Liberians killed in fighting in Monrovia were stacked outside the U.S. Embassy by people desperate to get the United States to intervene in that country's long civil war. Several editors discussed at length the use of pictures showing the bodies. We decided the photo was critical to understanding the story, so we looked at all the available photos to determine which could be best cropped to avoid showing faces of the dead.
On Thursday, we briefly discussed whether to runs the photos of Odai and Qusai Hussein, who were killed by U.S. forces last week. The close-up shots of the two men, bloodied and disfigured by their wounds, were disturbing. We decided not to run the photos and included a brief editor's note explaining why. No one called to complain about our decision.
The Photo Desk does the general editing of all wire photos, which are then passed to the wire editor who makes a final selection.
It is the Photo Desk's responsibility to ensure that the best photos of the day are included in the pages of The Advertiser.
Usually, that means selecting perhaps 20 pictures from nearly 1,000 wire photos and winnowing down dozens of photos shot by our own photographers to choose those we believe best convey the news of the day.
Seth Jones is The Advertiser's photo editor. Reach him at 525-8079 or sjones@honoluluadvertiser.com.
