Last Sunday’s Page 1 centerpiece was captivating. From the headline to the captions, to the dramatically cropped photo of a wide-eyed young woman being booked for prostitution, the package was provocative.
But one reader wondered if she was being manipulated into feeling certain emotions for Guitana “Gigi” Jones, who detailed to reporter Colin Poitras her drug-addicted relationship with former Waterbury Mayor Philip Giordano and their abuse of two children.
“We were surprised at the use of an 11-year-old mug shot for the cover,” Loris Simcik of Bloomfield said. “It was very sympathetic. You have a mug shot that is a year old that is much less sympathetic inside. Were you trying to slant the news? To make us feel more emotional about her?”
Managing Editor CliffTeutsch explained: “We work hard to present stories and photos properly – not to mislead. This story was about Jones’ relationship with Phil Giordano. Both photos were relevant to the story and both appeared with it – one on Page 1 and one inside. The 1992 photo was played on Page 1 because I decided it was more compelling and powerful and would better engage the reader in the story. There was no effort to be sympathetic to Guitana Jones or her conduct, to which she has pleaded guilty.”
If it’s possible that the photo of Jones’ young, fresh face didn’t make me feel sympathy for her, it certainly drew me into her story. Assistant Managing Editor for Photos and Graphics Thom McGuire, who lobbied against using the 1992 photo as the Page 1 centerpiece, said he believes news pictures should do more than that.
“For me it’s about accuracy and timeliness. It’s about journalism. The front page is for news. I’ll do things in Northeast, I’ll do things in Life, that I won’t do on Page 1. The front page is sacred to me,” McGuire said.
He said he would have preferred a Page 1 design with the 2001 mug shot that appeared inside the paper. “Yes, it’s fuzzy. Yes, it’s not quality. But I would’ve sacrificed a little quality for accuracy. The story wasn’t about her [in 1992]. It was about her now.”
Kenny Irby, a member of the visual journalism faculty at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla., said as long as the entire package provided context, neither option was wrong. “It’s about accuracy, truth-telling and integrity,” Irby said. Using the more recent photo inside “covers my concerns about that. But [Teutsch] is right. The cover is about competition and selling newspapers. In the past 15 years, newspapers have been facing the reality that they are in a competitive visual field against magazines, television and advertising and have to be more sophisticated in presentation. … It would’ve been a different discussion if the recent photo had not been used at all. I would’ve been concerned that balance wasn’t there.”
But with readers constantly calling my office questioning the media’s motives, integrity and biases, I am concerned with their interpretation.
The front page of the Sunday Courant is certainly a vehicle for longer-range views and different presentations. But, as Simcik said, “I could understand the picture on Northeast, since that’s more of a literary magazine, but on the front of the newspaper, I’m questioning the intent.”
It’s that question that’s troubling. The Courant should leave no doubt that the intent of the front page is to present news – straight, no chasers. Photographs are so important to The Courant’s front-page design that they sometimes seem to outweigh the stories. It’s the page designer’s job to balance the two – a tough job sometimes.
What is clear is that whatever emotions the 1992 mug shot stirred, there was no room for sympathy after reading Jones’ version of what took place among her, Waterbury’s former mayor and those children.
The Weather Page
Lisa Hurley’s call on Thursday struck a peeve of mine. The Glastonbury resident wanted to know what was up with the weather page.
“It’s pathetic,” Hurley said. “No weather report is 100 percent accurate, but two key pieces of information that most people need are what the duration of the storm is predicted to be and expected accumulation. Those two key pieces of information no longer appear on the weather page.”
Thursday the weather page simply predicted “chance of snow early.” It offered no clue as to how much of a chance or exactly what “early” meant. We ended up with a day of snow totaling up to 8 inches. Even the day after the storm, the reported precipitation totals were wrong.
Most people can accept the occasional lost degree-day or a precipitation total that occasionally falls behind, but the vague forecasts leave the weather page useless when extreme weather occurs.
To be clear, Justin Kiefer of WTIC-TV (Channel 61) does not provide the forecasts, although he writes a Q&A for the page. The forecasts are from Weather Central in Madison, Wis.
Scott Wendt, a Weather Central meteorologist, said, “We do the forecasts the morning before it’s in the paper. By the time the paper comes out, two more [forecast] models have since come out. That’s why we shied away from [predicting accumulations]. But it’s been addressed. We are going to make an effort to put accumulation forecasts in there.”
