A great photo captures the tone and message of a story. A solemn face for a sad tale. A packed crowd to illustrate a big event.
Last Sunday’s metropolitan front page appeared to have a perfect photo-story match. Thanks to a complaint from a reader, the paper discovered it wasn’t.
The story told of a drop in attendance at the Historic 18th and Vine district and appeared with a photo from the Blue Room jazz club.
The caption said “The Blue Room in the 18th and Vine district was far from full Friday night as jazz singer Ida McBeth performed. Officials are trying to boost attendance at events in the historic district.”
The picture showed just a few patrons. One reader called the next day with a big objection: The Blue Room that night was packed — for two shows.
Unfortunately the photographer arrived during a break and didn’t realize the crowd had dispersed between sets. Because he had to get to another assignment quickly, he took his pictures and left.
What he saw matched the gist of the story, which detailed a 13 percent attendance drop at the Historic 18th and Vine district in the last fiscal year.
The first reader who objected to the picture assumed the photo purposely misled readers and insulted jazz star Ida McBeth. An apology from the photo assignment editor helped.
“It’s unfortunate,” said photo editor Jim McTaggart. “We didn’t want to slight Ida McBeth, but the photographer wasn’t fully informed about the evening. This usually doesn’t happen, and I apologized.”
It’s important that photographers dig for information on assignments. The photographer had no idea he misrepresented the crowd. A few more questions about the crowd size earlier in the night or the number of people expected later might have prevented the mistake. A correction ran Friday.
Deadline pressures to cover more than one event during an evening can make a photographer unintentionally miss a show-stopping scene, or the most representative crowd shot.
The caption that editors wrote for the photo described the venue as “far from full.” And the situation became far from fair.
“She’s a treasure,” said one McBeth fan, who complained later in the week about the photo. Another said McBeth’s bookings might suffer if people think she didn’t draw a crowd. The critics agreed that the historic district may be hurting, but Ida McBeth’s fan following isn’t.
Among the other complaints from Sunday’s paper by readers this week:
Ben Nicks of Shawnee pointed out a mangled reference to Ben Jonson speaking of William Shakespeare. Jonson said Shakespeare knew “small Latin and less Greek”; in the paper, the quote mistakenly appeared as “knew small Greek and less Latin.”
Nicks ended his e-mail by recalling that the best answer to the controversy of who really penned Shakespeare’s works came years ago from The Star’s Bill Vaughan, who wrote: “William Shakespeare’s plays were not written by William Shakespeare but by another man with the same name.”
