There comes a time in some arguments or conversations when you realize that you are wrong, wrong, just completely incorrect, and there is nothing left to do but backpedal and apologize and feel stuck in the present, stranded by your mistake, with no excuse to cling to -- you are wrong, and there’s little more to say.
I had a conversation like that recently. It came on the heels of a mistake -- a big one -- that took me by surprise and revealed something new about my biases as an editor.
The roots of my error were in the final story meeting for Pointssouth.net. That’s when Keith, Kelly, Vicki and I sat down to plot out the last week of stories on the site.
We scheduled a story for the centerpiece slot on Monday that we knew had no strong visual element -- Peter’s piece about cars rocketing over Thrill Hill. It was a good story; and hey, I said, we can probably find a picture to use. I knew we had a whole stack of images from an earlier graphic presentation on Thrill Hill by Amber and Javi. I wrote a note to myself: Talk to Amber.
Somehow, I never did, and suddenly it was Sunday night, 9:30 p.m., and I needed a centerpiece image. Amber was nowhere to be found and no one had seen her. No problem -- her images were on the server. Not in my drop box, it’s true, but no matter: They were cropped, titled and ready to go.
There was one I hadn’t seen before, one that hadn’t made it into the presentation: A close-up of Thrill Hill showing the jagged scars of a thousand rough touchdowns etched into the pavement. It was perfect, I thought -- an interesting texture, a telling detail from Peter’s story.
I resized the image, wrote a caption and posted it. Mission accomplished.
It didn’t seem like a mistake at the time.
The next day Amber found me in the newsroom. I knew immediately that something was wrong. It had to be the photo.
Amber was definitely upset, possibly angry -- though she hardly showed it. She explained to me, in even tones, how surprised she had been to see her picture on the Web. Well, that made sense; I had never told her that Peter’s Thrill Hill story was going to be a centerpiece, let alone that I was hoping to use one of her pictures as the accompanying image.
The detail photo was just an experiment, Amber explained -- the photographic equivalent of a rough draft. In the end, she had decided that it didn’t support the story that she and Javi were telling -- and of course, at that time, Peter’s story hadn’t even come into the equation.
At first I rationalized. Okay, I said, I understand your point. My procrastination had put me in a crunch. But hey, photographs don’t always fit perfectly well with the stories they accompany; sometimes, they need to serve the broader needs of the newspaper, or the Web site; sometimes they just need to fill the space…
And it was there that I realized my line of argument was taking me to a point I didn’t actually believe in.
Sure, practically speaking, photographs sometimes do just fill the space. But that it happens doesn’t make it a less insulting practice -- and why should I, producing a Web site at The Poynter Institute, of all places, be indulging in any insulting practices at all?
The more Amber talked -- and the more her mortal discomfort with what I had done sunk in -- the more I thought about some of my other mistakes with photojournalists this summer, and what it revealed about my biases.
I had cropped several photos to fit in story layouts. Would I have chopped out the middle of the corresponding stories to make room for larger pictures? Doubtful. I know how much time writers spend putting things in the right order, building transitions, sprinkling gold coins. I wouldn’t mess with that.
I had completely re-framed one photo -- one of Amber’s, wouldn’t you know it -- changing its composition to preserve some details I thought were important. Would I ever rewrite a reporter’s nut graf to emphasize a point I thought deserved more attention? No way. It would be the editorial equivalent of kidnapping someone’s baby.
And now, of course, I had posted a photo that hadn’t been tagged for publication. Would I ever open up a writer’s rough draft, give it a once-over, and post it on the Web? Not in a million years, if only because I’d know she would kill me when she found out.
As I thought about it, I realized that I -- someone who has often proclaimed his allegiance to images, who in fact designed this summer’s Web site to showcase photography -- had been operating with a double standard. Or, at the least, an incomplete standard: It didn’t respect photojournalists enough. It made it okay not to consult them on changes to their images. It didn’t even understand the difference between complete and incomplete work. It had annoyed several photojournalists and, finally, insulted one of them.
So, what do you do but apologize? I did, and after Peter’s Thrill Hill story rotated out of the centerpiece slot, I took Amber’s image down -- retiring it back to the unpublished folder where I should have left it in the first place.
I used to see all these articles on the Poynter Web site about the difficulties that “word people” have working with “image people” and vice versa and think, “How ridiculous! Good thing I’m so broad-minded; I don’t have those problems.”
But I was fooling myself. Sure, I respect visual journalism. I’ve even done it. But I don’t understand the processes, especially not the processes of photojournalism, in the same way that I understand the writing process. That lack of understanding is what opens the door to bad practices, to mistakes and to insults.
Maybe I ought to go back and read some of those articles. Maybe I ought to sit in on some more photojournalism seminars, too. This is the beginning. I was wrong, and I’m ready to learn.