Interesting Links for 17-07-2013

[andrewducker]

• This is what it looks like when you replace photographers with iPhone-wielding reporters
  (tags: newspapers photography )
• Why different polls show Labout 9 points ahead, and tied with the Conservatives
  (tags: politics uk polls )
• The Perfect Robot: A graduation speech
  (tags: comic education )
• Dementia Rate Is Found to Drop Sharply, as Forecast
  (tags

Comments

[simont]

Mmm. It doesn't seem to me that I can fairly judge the photography from that Tumblr, because it's putting each day's front pages up against each other with completely different stories, rather than showing the photos going with the corresponding story in each paper.

I suppose in terms of picking a photo that'll sell the entire paper to someone, choice of which story to put a big picture of on the front page is also an important factor, but at that point I think you've moved beyond criticising the photography into criticising the marketing strategy. (Unless, I suppose, the staff photographers are/were also the people making those decisions? Perhaps my ignorance of the roles in a newspaper office is letting me down.)

In the first case where I did see photos of the same story, it seemed to me a clear win for the Sun-Times (with the non-pro photographers), because both papers had the identical shot of the missing boy but the Sun-Times was showing people actually digging him out of the sand while the Tribune showed a picture of his grandfather. I don't really care if one of those is a stock photo and the other taken in-house (should that turn out to be the case); the former tells me more interesting things.

[steer]

Exactly as you say I think... I thought there was one case with a clear winner and it wasn't the pro photographers. It seems that in practice the strategy works well at least for the photos we can see so far but I don't know enough to say and it's just from looking at a small number of photos.