Concord Monitor Ran Doctored Reader-Submitted Photo
June 21, 2007
This story illustrates the challenges media organizations face when accepting user-generated content. If you’ve sat next to me eating dinner before a Jazz game this year, you know where I think user-generated content is going. If you haven’t, I think it’s coming to news organizations in a big way. But there is a big difference in the content generated by professionals following the ethics of journalism and the content generated by amateurs.
A snippet from the PDN article:
The Concord (N.H.) Monitor acknowledged that a reader-submitted photo published in Tuesday’s newspaper had been doctored.
The picture, showing a group of local students who planted an herb garden in memory of a school secretary who died of cancer, was “manipulated in order to fit all the students in,” the paper said.
A snippet from the Concord Monitor article, “Pictures can lie, but not in a newspaper”:
Monitor photo editor Dan Habib has created an ethics policy that says: “Manipulation of photographs in any manner that might mislead, confuse or otherwise misrepresent the subject or event is strictly prohibited. We will not change backgrounds, reverse photos, add, delete or move objects.”
The philosophy behind the rule is simple: Readers must be able to trust that the photos they see and the articles they read in their newspaper are true. Nothing takes precedence over our credibility.
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