Newsday strikes a tone, but are Newman's eyes THAT blue?

Was Newsday wrong in bringing out the blue in this photo in order for it to accompany the quote? You decide.

Adobe Photoshop is used widely in the newspaper industry for the cropping and color toning of news photographs. It's also frequently used in design-heavy pages employed by most newspapers these days.

The program has legitimate uses, but it can be abused, too.

We've heard of many controversies in journalism in which photographers have doctored photos for dramatic effect. One of the more recent ones is when Reuters admitted to darkening and increasing the volume of smoke billowing over Beirut in 2006. It was a particularly poor cloning job, so it's no wonder consumers and media critics saw through it.

This example, which I believe is exclusive to The Offlede, is less egregious.

It would appear that a newspaper has adjusted the colors of a photo for the sake of design. Newsday's Sept. 28 cover about the death of Paul Newman also included a quote of actress Eva Marie Saint saying "Yes, his eyes were that blue and beautiful." It seems that the blue hues in the photo were enriched to make the quote work.

The Daily News in New York City used the same photo on its cover, but it looks quite different. Newman's eyes are more gray than blue, and the background similarly isn't as colorful in the Daily News version.

In the original, which The Associated Press ran on its wires, the hues are grayish-blue.

On the Newsday cover, the most telling indicator is Newman's hair. The highlights are gray in the original, but in the Newsday photo, they are blue.

Toning a photo so that it corresponds with a text element, such as Saint's quote, is a questionable practice. I asked a co-worker, and she agreed that Newsday was walking a fine line with this cover. We both said Newman's eyes are the same aqua marine of the Atlantic Ocean here in Central Florida.

What do you think?

OFFLEDE EXCLUSIVE! New York Post, scared out of its wits, takes down Ashley Dupre photos; Eliot Spitzer disappointed

A screen shot of the New York Post's Web page, http://www.nypost.com/seven/03142008/news/regionalnews/dupre/photo01.htm, comes up empty early Saturday morning, after the tabloid took down a racy photo gallery of Gov. Eliot Spitzer's alleged call girl, Ashley Alexandra Dupre, or "Kristen," her reported prostitute alias.

It's out of character for The Offlede to be the first to do something (after all, it's not The Lede), but there's a first time for everything, including a first time not to be second. So, tell your friends. ...

Sometimes, controversy created by the media is easily foreseen. I saw this one coming. And it was banging drums and waving huge fluorescent red flags along the way.

The Associated Press just moved (3:45 a.m.) a story (here) about Ashley Alexandra Dupre being vewy vewy angwy over the use of her MySpace photos and other pictures of her in publications.

And apparently the extremely racy photos that the New York Post ran of her were taken by an outside photographer and sold to the newspaper on a freelance basis.

Interestingly enough, though, the photo gallery that the Post had on its Web site no longer exists. If you were to click this link, which once led to the gallery, you would see "Page Not Found." I spared you the effort above, too.

The AP story was not successful in getting a comment from the Post on its publication of the photos in print. The story did not address that the Post Web site had taken down the photos sometime late Friday or early Saturday.

Well, I'm addressing that here: They're gone. And I don't know anything more.

The AP also explained its own reasoning for running the MySpace photos on the wire. I jokingly created four questions requiring keen news judgment that, hypothetically, were flying around the newsrooms of The New York Times, Newsday, the New York Post and the New York Daily News. (See this post.) But it appears that they probably were pretty accurate.

Here is the quote from the AP story:

"The Associated Press discussed the photos obtained from the MySpace page in great detail and found that they were newsworthy," said Associated Press National Photo Editor V.W. Vaughan. "We distributed the photos that were relevant to the story. Those photos did not show nudity, nor were they explicit."

Before I posted the MySpace photos on The Offlede, which was done as a media criticism instead of an exploitation of New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer's alleged prostitute, I looked at the MySpace terms of use. Here is what they say, in part:

By displaying or publishing ("posting") any Content on or through the MySpace Services, you hereby grant to MySpace a limited license to use, modify, delete from, add to, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce, and distribute such Content solely on or through the MySpace Services, including without limitation distributing part or all of the MySpace Website in any media formats and through any media channels, except Content marked “private” will not be distributed outside the MySpace Website.

It seems that MySpace rightfully distributed them. For further details, click here.

I think this is an Offlede exclusive because I can't see a story about the Post's photo removal anywhere else on the Internet, not even on Gawker, New York City's media gossip blog. Creeps everywhere probably are disappointed about the Post's removal of the gallery, so real blogs such as Gawker better get on the story.

In this post, Gawker says, "New York 'Post' Has Best Week Ever."

Just imagine what would happen if it turns out that the feds had the wrong "Kristen" in the first place.

It could prove to be the Post's worst week ever.

From classy to trashy: Photo crops of Spitzer's call girl reveal character of New York media

One of the main stories on the Web sites of four New York newspapers is about soon-to-be-former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer's alleged mistress, Ashley Alexandra Dupre (also known by her prostitute alias "Kristen" ... allegedly).

Each newspaper grabbed photos from her MySpace page, and each cropped them a bit differently. Look at the differences. They really show something about the nature of these papers' coverage of the news.


The New York Times: Good quality, but pretty conservative. A close crop. Nice aviators. Real classy.



Newsday (disclosure: I'm a former employee): Enlarged, decreasing quality, but still a respectable crop. Newsday is a tabloid only in format, not in content. And as usual, Newsday enjoys the scenery around the subject of the photo. Where is this taken, anyway? Not Melbourne.



The New York Post: Genuine tabloid picture. Eliot Spitzer's alleged woman in high-quality, eye-popping format.



New York Daily News: Gives us the whole thing. Enlarged and poor quality. Real trashy.

I can hear the questions flying in the newsrooms right now:

New York Times: "Indeed, we must search deep into our minds and ask ourselves, Is this photo really newsworthy? Call the company therapist immediately."

Newsday: "We should ask ourselves, Is her body below the neck really newsworthy? Put a poll on the Web site to see what our readers think."

New York Post: "This photo came from MySpace? I wonder if Murdoch knew her. Hey, get the Rupe on the phone, stat!"

New York Daily News: "Why did she have to wear all these clothes? Someone ask Hugh Hefner if he has made a deal with Kristen!"

Former employer Newsday is gettin' clicky wit it

This is the Newsday newsroom with the copy desk in the foreground, where I started writing headlines for the Newsday Web site about a month into my time there. The special headline-writing effort has paid off for Newsday: It was one of the most-visited newspaper sites last month, besting others such as The Wall Street Journal. The photo features one of Newsday's best, Al Ortez.

News comes with great pleasure but without much surprise that Newsday's Web site was one of the top five most visited for all newspapers. The New York Times, which did seem surprised, wrote a short story about it today:

BUSINESS / MEDIA & ADVERTISING

Web Cartoon Bolsters Visits to Newsday

By PRADNYA JOSHI

Published: January 21, 2008

"Many people in the industry expressed surprise when, for the second consecutive month, Newsday.com ranked in the top five of the most visited newspaper Web sites, with 6.45 million unique visitors in December, an increase of 183 percent from the previous year, according to data from Nielsen Online."

When I arrived at Newsday, there was a great movement afoot to find new ways to get more clicks online. At first, Newsday copy editors only wrote print newspaper headlines. But about a month into my stint there - I think it was July - we started writing Web headlines, all in an attempt to get more clicks.

Such an effort also is under way here in Brevard County, Fla., at FLORIDA TODAY. But there are key differences that allow Newsday, obviously the much larger publication, to enjoy greater success so far.

The Times article mentions the use of technology to place stories high on search engine results. But one of the least sophisticated and least complicated methods to draw readers through engines such as Google has been rewriting headlines from the print version of Newsday to the Web version.

I attended training sessions about this when I arrived at Newsday and again when I started at FLORIDA TODAY. Everyone uses search today. Tailoring headlines through the use of keywords makes headlines more attractive to search engines. It's called SEO, or search engine optimization. A search engine-optimized headline usually contains place names, people names - basically, a few of the five W's (who, what, when, where and sometimes why).

I remember sitting in the conference room at Newsday, just across the hall from where all the newspaper's Pulitzers Prizes are displayed. The presenters put a quote onto the PowerPoint screen that said, "Don't write for Google. Write for readers, with Google in mind."

That's not entirely true because I see more headlines these days that are 100 percent for Google, not the reader: ones such as "New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady intercepted three times but wins game 21-12 against Philip Rivers and San Diego Charges." What used to be the lede sentence of a story is now the headline. But such a headline would draw many readers to its host Web site because almost every word for which the common searcher would look is included.

The Times story also mentions Facebook widgets and bookmarking for services such as Digg, MySpace and Google.

FLORIDA TODAY hasn't put these tools to use yet. As is the case at most newspaper Web sites, editors here have click fever, the undying need to get more clicks. Tools (or more accurately, efforts) such as rewriting headlines instead of shoveling them from the print newspaper to the Web, however, haven't been employed yet. Social bookmarking is a bit more complicated, though it is simple enough for me to use here on The Offlede.

With each story I pored over as a Newsday copy editor, I wrote a headline first for the newspaper, then another that was keyed toward the Web on the top of each story. This is one of the simplest and least expensive ways to become a more successful Web site through increased clickage. Here are my top five routes to click heaven:

1. Write headlines with Google-flavored keywords: Someone searching for Britney Spears could as easily be directed toward a small newspaper as toward TMZ.com, as long as the headline is full of juicy words such as "Britney Spears." Yummy.
   
2. Use social bookmarking such as Digg, Facebook and Del.icio.us: These sites are extension sites where content can be placed for free but will end up driving more users your way. The more tools on your plate, the more random bites you'll get.
   
3. Put hyperlinks into stories: Driving traffic to external sites may get you noticed by users of those external sites. Plus, it's convenient for your readers. They add serious meat to content.
   
4. Use YouTube and Viddler as video servers: This isn't always an option for a newspaper that wants some videos to remain exclusive and limited to its own Web site. But YouTube videos serve as an easy way to get noticed. Serious YouTubers spend hours browsing the site and will find your video and eventually check out your Web site. Cool vids are the priceless morsels these people crave.
   
5. Use public blogging platforms such as Blogger, WordPress and even Twitter microblogs: News travels so fast on the blogosphere. Newspaper bloggers should open up their sites to the public, allowing the utmost interaction with readers through comments and complementary postings. The real blogosphere - populated by commoners, not traditional journalists using a new medium - is a largely untouched readership market with lots of potential. Interaction with other bloggers will get a newspaper blogger into the real blog environment. If you ignore them, you may alienate them. Then, they'll eat you up.
   

The future of newspapers is online. The gauge of the success in this movement comes, not through circulation figures, but through click tallies. And from more clicks on stories comes more clicks on advertisements and more money.

Newsday is a model that many could stand to learn from.