Y’know, my college newspaper just got a new editor. That must explain the picture on the front page of the newest edition of The Roundup.
Somebody got a picture from the inside of the lobby of our Performing Arts Building, looking out (it opens onto a large balcony overlooking the majority of the campus). Then, somebody apparently thought it would be clever to superimpose the image of a 747 aimed right towards the building.
I stared at the picture for about five minutes, feeling the bile rise in my throat. “20,000 people die from a plane crashing into a building, and they think this picture is a good idea?” I said. The theatre department chairman was utterly disgusted at the image, and another of the theatre department directors took one look at it, then turned away and mumbled, “Oh my god.”
Here’s a word of advice to anyone else who works on any sort of publication: Don’t make up images of planes crashing into more buildings. Sure, it may be clever, in a Manson-ish sort of way, and it may take some amount of skill with CG manipulation… but it demonstrates the most assholic lack of tact that I’ve ever seen.
Call the paper’s advisor and lodge a complaint. Not only is that in venomnously bad taste, but it is wholesale manufacturing of news. Any ethical journalist would see the perpetrator fired for it. The paper’s advisor should be able to raise hell, if not kick the idiot who put that together off the paper entirely.
Maybe they were trying to convey what it might have been like to look out a window at the WTC? Thinking it might be hard for those outside NYC to relate, so they substitute something more familiar to their readers?
As a current journalist, I am too. Though I can hardly complain because a lot of people here would be amazed at the “artistic abilities” of whatever lugnut did that.
We’ve got an amazingly stupid set of people working on out school paper. We’ve got a rather intelligent set working on the paper people actually read.
There was a publication here that we got a day before. It had on it’s cover a building bending out of the way of a plane. It was an ad for flexon (some eyeglass material) with the words don’t you wish everything was as flexable’. Not bad taste as it was before the event but bad timing - are you sure that the paper wasn’t published before the event?
That’s exactly what it was. It doesn’t change the fact that it was designed simply for the shock value. You can “bring home” a tragedy without having to make the readers think, “Dear God, we’re next!”
Positive. I talked with the photographer before she took the pictures (it was on Tuesday, late afternoon). If I had known what they were going to do with it, I’d have told her to find pictures of a bunny rabbit or something.