December 11, 2009 Court Room Twitter/Blogging Guide The Citizen Media Law Project has written a guide to help journalists blog or tweet from court. Some good advice. Categories Ethics & Legal
November 5, 2009 Rules Are Good The legendary David Burnett writes about rules and how technology has changed the way photojournalists have worked over his 40 year career. How digital imaging (man, I hate that phrase) made so many of our old means seem quaint. And how, now, we have all new ethical dilemmas to obsess over. I’m actually glad the rules exist (such as they... Categories Craft/Ethics & Legal
October 15, 2009 Prior Restraint or Patriotism? The U.S. military in Afghanistan has changed the rules which members of the media must follow when embedded with a unit. The key change is in section 14: 14. Media will not be allowed to photograph or record video of U.S. personnel killed in action. Thoughts? Categories At Work/Business & Industry/Ethics & Legal
September 17, 2009 Ethics vs. Art: The Crop The New York Times‘ Lens blog (really, a must read at this point) has an essay up by David Hume Kennerly where he talks about a photo he shot of former Vice President Dick Cheney at home with his family preparing a dinner meal. The image was picked up by Newsweek, but two thirds of it was cropped out. Kennerly... Categories Ethics & Legal/Good Work
September 7, 2009 Casualties of War: Do You Move It? Do You Run It? The Associated Press has come under a lot of fire this past week for moving an image of a mortally wounded American soldier in Afghanistan. The soldier was hit by a rocket propelled grenade in August and the wire service held the image until this past week. They were not being censored – it was their decision to hold it.... Categories Ethics & Legal/Good Work/Journalism
July 30, 2009 Called Out by a Reader … Wrongly The Reader’s Representative Journal at the Los Angeles Times got a question from a reader pertaining to a photo they had published and suggesting they look into it. Turns out, there’s nothing wrong with the image – it was made with a 400 mm lens and a 2x converter, which means it was shot at a focal length of 800... Categories Ethics & Legal
July 12, 2009 Bound to Happen, I Suppose So, there’s this whole legal wrangling going on about Shepard Fairey’s Obama poster – the Associated Press claims the illustration is based on one of their photographs. Except now the photojournalist who actually took the photo is claiming it isn’t AP’s – it’s his. This should be fun … Categories Business & Industry/Ethics & Legal
July 9, 2009 Reuters Handbook Now Online While many of our word colleagues are excited about the public release of the Reuters Handbook of Journalism, I wouldn’t expect many to start deviating from the more widely used Associated Press Stylebook. For us, though, there is a very nice page on what you can and cannot do with photographs. I’m still processing a few bits of it, but... Categories Business & Industry/Ethics & Legal
July 8, 2009 Flipped Image in NY Times Magazine Uh oh … seems a photographer has been playing in Photoshop and sending the results off to the New York Times‘ Sunday magazine. I do love this quote, though, from Adam Gurno, the man who found the fakery: When you work in computer programming … there’s a maxim in the programming world that says “all bugs are shallow to 10,000 eyes.”... Categories Ethics & Legal