Welcome back to Slow News Days, a now-and-then newsletter on journalism and journalism-adjacent topics in the Philippines.
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Many of the challenges faced by journalists and journalism can really be solved by money at them — or, conversely, were caused by taking money from solutions that used to already be in place.
Last week, for example, the Philstar newsroom got a valid (if harsh) reminder on the need to vet handout photos, especially those from candidates’ campaigns.
“It does matter to readers that news outlets show independence from sources by using their own photos or those of their correspondents and stringers, or wire services,” Luz Rimban, executive director of the Asian Center for Journalism at Ateneo de Manila University, said of our use of a file photo in a story on the proclamation rally of the Marcos-Duterte ticket.
Newsrooms ought to, she said, “use source photos only as a very last resort, or if no one else has them and image is something not obtainable elsewhere.”
Veteran photojournalist Jes Aznar added that “[t]he photo, used to show readers the truth, can also be a major misinformation tool especially in the digital age where use of images over the internet trump text many times over.”
This, as he points out, is not a new call. He, and other photojournalists, raised it last year, when the president seemed to be missing and his longtime aide (and sometimes senator) released photos of him playing golf and riding a motorcycle as a sort of proof of life (if not at skill at golf).
More on that here: Photos need fact checks too
“This fight (against fake news and disinformation) starts with understanding what photojournalism is and the use of photography and images should not be taken only as page fillers and to make a page colorful. Visual literacy among ALL editorial members is a MUST,” he also said.
These are, of course, well-meaning critiques to nudge the industry towards more credibility as it struggles against mis- and disinformation.
But these are critiques of practices adopted to address deficiencies caused by policies that the individual journalist has little control over — but inevitably gets the blame for*.
Due to a number of reasons — including health and safety and the tendency of the campaign’s press people to ignore us — we did not have people at the event. We do not, because we don’t have money for it, generally have people at actual events.
What we did have was a story written in advance that would be updated as the event happened. We also had a stock photo as a placeholder with the intention of changing it when a better image was available.
After a quick assessment, we agreed that what we could have done was replace the placeholder photo or, at the very least, dated the photo we used.
These are all, of course, easy to say and obvious in hindsight but the fact is your average journalist already has too many things to think about that it’s easy to slip up on things like this.
In principle, I don’t think any journalist will disagree that knowing how to vet photographs and how to better use them as part of their stories. The photojournalist community has been open to helping newsrooms and journalists learn more about visual communication (ironically, I have actually attended a session on it so really should have known better).
In practice, though, it risks being yet another thing that we have to worry about on top of social media tools, pageview data, our crippling anxiety and self-doubt, and the stories we work on.
Does that mean giving less importance to visual communication? It necessarily does. That value judgment, though, was not made by journalists but by the people who hire them.
Related and sad from 2013: Here's What It Looks Like When You Replace Photographers With iPhone-Wielding Reporters
In a related Facebook post, this time about stealing photos from photojournalists, Aznar points out a lack of photojournalists in newsroom staffs, which “gives us the impression that they don’t give much importance to photographs and to photojournalism…”
The ideal solution is not to give media workers more tasks but to hire more people who are better trained for those tasks.
We all do our part to better inform our audiences and to combat disinformation, but that responsibility cannot rest on the individual practitioner alone.
If we have to be everything, we might end up being nothing.
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* Unfortunately included in the screenshot of the article critiqued was the byline of our reporter Tin, who is really very (sometimes frustratingly but correctly) careful about her reporting. The issue is with the story used, which was ultimately my responsibility, and not with the story, which you can read here.
From that same event, “It's 'Unity, Unity, Unity' for UniTeam's presidential bet Marcos”
Our climate and environment reporter Gaea suffered the trauma of collaborating with me on a story supported by Oxfam Philippines and Climate Tracker.
Reading “Solar power offers students in unelectrified Laiban a chance to catch up” might make it worth it.
“Along the path of MRT-7, tension over land use and food security” is a look at a land dispute in San Jose Del Monte, Bulacan and recent harassment there of peasant advocates and journalists from alternative media who were interviewing them.
Doing stories like this is always a risk and I really don’t know how long we can keep doing itRelatable (and enraging): “For workers like Len-len who regularly pull overtimes, Imee gave this advice: ‘Time management ‘yan eh (You need time management),” from “‘Ako si LenLen’: Workers share stories of sweat, labor after Marcos insult” on Rappler
And a rejoinder from Bulatlat, which is celebrating its 21st anniversary this month: “18 hours of work per day? Small businesses bear the brunt of price hikes, call for government response”