Seldom have I heard such sadness in a reader’s voice mail. Anger and sarcasm often color such messages. But this reader’s spirit was groaning.
She had called late the night before and sounded exhausted. “Ohhh,” she sighed in a near-whisper. “I do wish that the news weren’t all bad. It’s so bad. So hard to read the paper. Can’t you put in some happy news?”
That’s a good question for humanity, whose struggles create much of the day’s news. And that’s a fair question for the messenger.
We know that life churns with a sense of humor as well as horror and a need for refreshment. As with the reader above, people (journalists included) need breaks from brutal reality, and that’s one reason why Star-Telegram content in print and online includes comfort zones on Page One and elsewhere.
Granted, humor and comfort might not provoke levels of concern and action that mark “real” news, but most readers appreciate some entertainment value mixed with news value. That’s why the Star-Telegram makes room for puzzles, comics, contests, blogs, light-hearted video, celebrity gossip and occasional humor from columnists.
Most of those features comprise deeply entrenched comfort zones. And woe to editors who foul them with error or omit them. When Time Inc. folded the Life magazine insert in April, fans of the publication’s addictive picture puzzle vented their disappointment in scores of e-mails and phone calls to me that persist to this day.
The popularity of the puzzle was not lost on Executive Editor Jim Witt and his news team. They’ve found a way to launch a similar feature and to add value by using local photos. The puzzle runs Mondays in the local section’s Page 2B Main Street package.
Creating the puzzle also created an unusual assignment for Star-Telegram photographers in that it called for deliberate and extensive manipulation of images. Such a task ordinarily would give serious pause to photojournalists because it’s the perverse equivalent of a writer fabricating information — a career-killing violation of ethics.
But the photo puzzle is exempt. Turns out that photographers Ross Hailey and Joyce Marshall have had as much fun dinking with the first two weeks’ images as readers have had in trying to find the differences between the real picture and the altered version.
Still, Hailey said, altering an image with help from the computer program Adobe Photoshop “has reminded me how easily the truth can be twisted” electronically to create “a photorealistic version of anything imaginable [and why] photojournalists must do all they can to preserve the trust given them by the reader.”
Marshall said the picture-puzzle assignment surprised her at first because image manipulation is “the antithesis of photojournalism.”
But creating the puzzle “is great fun,” she said. “It’s kind of scary to see how easy it is to manipulate an image, but it’s fun to create a challenge for readers.”
With so much disturbing news these days, the puzzle might have come along at a good time for readers who share the late-night caller’s sense of despair about dark news.
Such comfort zones are part of an antidote to news burnout. As my city editor at the Dallas Times Herald told me years ago when I was hammered from covering a long string of troubling developments: “House, loosen up. Go read the silliest stuff you can find.”
I wandered into the paper’s comfort zones: comics pages, celebrity news and other features that I’d pompously dismissed as a silly waste of time. Wrong. They cut the big news down to size and helped take some of the sting out of reality.
It’s like Ralph Waldo Emerson said. “No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit.”
