The iconic image

Few of us get to leave the impression that Joe Rosenthal did.

Rosenthal was the 33-year-old Associated Press photographer who took the picture of Marines raising the flag during the fierce battle of Iwo Jima in the Pacific in 1945.

That image struck an instant chord with viewers, and it has been stuck in our consciousness ever since. It has been reproduced millions of times in many forums and is the basis for the giant Marine memorial that overlooks the nation's capital.

Rosenthal was an excellent photographer during his entire career -- not just a guy with a camera at the right place and time. He died on Sunday at the age of 94.

(Check out what the San Francisco Chronicle, the newspaper where he worked for many years, had to say about him; also take a look at the retrospective at Poynter.)

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News orgs discover web's immediacy

A couple of stories from Romenesko’s blog on today show that big time news organizations are discovering the immediacy of the web.

One comes from Westworld, which reports that when the Denver Post stumbled onto a scoop last month about beer magnate Peter Coors being arrested for drunk driving, the Post nailed the story and then put it on the organization’s web site – despite some grousing from the traditionalists. These folks thought a story like that should be saved for print first, which was several hours away. The paper’s managing editor said the web would be “our breaking news platform.”

Then there is the story about CBS streaming its nightly news program simultaneously with its over-the-air broadcast. This, apparently, has come about only after painstaking negotiations with affiliates.

One is tempted to ask: “Where have these folks been for the last 10 years or so?”



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Seeing and believing

This week's incidents of photo-doctoring of pictures from Lebanon that have been published by some news organizations have provoked a good deal of outrage and hand-wringing.

So they should.

Changing a photograph in a way that alters its meaning -- even if only incidentally -- is not a good thing for journalists or journalism. We have been reading about this sort of thing far too much these days, and unfortunately, we will probably continue to hear about such behavior.

But in an article in Slate ("Don't Believe What You See in the Papers"), Jim Lewis has some valuable perspective on how we view photography. A photograph has power because we believe it; we think that if we had been standing beside the photographer when it was taken, we would have seen the same thing. That's not true, and Lewis does a good job of reminding us of that fact.

Lewis also links to a "rogue's gallery" of digital manipulation put together by Dartmouth's Haney Farid that reminds us that this sort of thing happens on a regular basis.



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An expensive comma

Sometimes punctuation can be expensive.

That was certainly the case for Rogers Communications of Canada, which recently found that its misreading of a contract -- not recognizing the meaning of the placement of a comma in a particular sentence of a contract -- will cost the company a couple of million dollars. All this is according an article in the Toronto Globe and Mail.

Rogers had a contract to put cable lines across thousands of untility polls in the Maritimes. Rogers thought the agreement was good for at least five years because of the sentence that the agreement "shall continue in force for a period of five years from the date it is made, and thereafter for successfive year terms, unless and until terminated by one year prior notice in writing by either party."

The contract was with Aliant, Inc. More than a year ago, Aliant informed Rogers that it was giving notice that it was scrapping the contract based on that sentence. Rogers argued that its understanding was that the contract, which was still in its first five-year period, could not be disgarded so easily.

But the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission disagreed.

The comma, the commission said, gave Aliant the right to cancel the contract during the first five years with only a year's notice. Alient will do so, and renotiating the contract will cost Rogers about $2 million.

A high price to pay for overlooking a comma.



Read more about journalism and issues facing the profession at JPROF.com.