Total Pageviews

Pictures of the Day: Germany and Elsewhere

#flashHeader{visibility:visible !important;}

Photos from Germany, Turkey, China and Spain.

Follow Lens on Facebook and Twitter.



A Photographic Champion of Latinos

#flashHeader{visibility:visible !important;}

This is Puerto Rican Week in New York City, when flags cover cars, banners and bodies, accompanied by a two-three beat that sends spirits soaring. But in one newsroom, every week is Puerto Rican Week â€" and Colombian, Cuban, Dominican, Ecuadorean, Mexican and Salvadoran Week, too.

El Diario-La Prensa â€" the city’s storied Spanish-language newspaper, which is celebrating its centennial this year â€" has seen the city’s Latino population change from a predominantly Puerto Rican enclave to a broad representation of Latin America. Not content to stay on the sidelines, it, like other ethnic news publications, has been an advocate, proudly calling itself “el campeón de los Hispanos,” or “the champion of the Hispanics.”

DESCRIPTIONCourtesy of Bolívar Arellano Muhammad Ali and Bolívar Arellano in June 1971.

For some, like my cousin Charlie, it was the breakfast of champions. He would visit Mami with a copy of El Diario folded under his arm. Mami would brew café con leche and set it on the plastic-covered dining room table, and together they would read the paper. The ritual was set â€" read a story, dip a slice of Gouda into the coffee, savor the gooey cheese, talk. Lamenting the sad state of the world, or rejoicing at some Puerto Rican kid’s triumph, was optional.

Now a lot more people will be able to savor part of that experience, sans coffee and gooey Gouda, as Columbia University recently acquired 5,000 images spanning 40 years of El Diario’s photographic coverage. The collection, part of Columbia’s Latino Arts and Activism Archive, is a rich documentation of another world â€" albeit one that has existed in plain sight of New Yorkers.

“The narrative about our city is often stitched to yesteryear’s European migration, or today, to waves of hipsters, with a splash of color thrown in on occasion,” Erica Gonzalez, the paper’s executive editor, wrote in an e-mail. “In that context, Latinos have long been treated as an ‘other’ at best, or as a nuisance or invisible at worst. What you see in the photos, in the archives, is how Latinos have been part of the fabric of this city for a long time, not beginning when marketers ‘discovered’ us.”

Bolívar Arellano is among the stalwarts who have chronicled the good and the bad, both here and abroad. He worked as a freelance photographer for El Diario from 1974 to 1993, when he was hired as a staff photographer at The New York Post. (His brother, Humberto, remains at El Diario as a staff photographer.)

Mr. Arellano, now 68, arrived in New York in 1971 from his native Ecuador after receiving one threat too many from the military for digging into things it wanted to keep buried.

A friend who worked for The Associated Press in Ecuador gave him a letter of introduction to the wire service, which sent him out with English-speaking photographers to learn the ropes. That experience served him well when he arrived at El Diario and realized that the chief of photography did not have a police scanner and that the other photographers waited for assignments.

He bought a scanner.

“I listened to the radio for news,” he said, chuckling. “So, if 30 pictures ran in the paper, I had 20 of them.”

But he was guided by more than just what crackled over the airwaves. Knowing that the English-language press often looked only at crime and poverty in the Latino community, he looked for images that challenged those stereotypes. And even in his coverage of straight news, like campaign stops or civic events, he had his own focus.

DESCRIPTIONMatthew McDermott/The New York Post, courtesy of Bolívar Arellano Mr. Arellano on Sept. 11, 2001.

“During the mayor’s swearing-in, I would look for the Latinos,” Mr. Arellano said. “My primary objective was to always push Latinos ahead.”

Politicians, in turn, reached out to him when they had something big. In 1977, Representative Herman Badillo told him that he and other Hispanic lawmakers were going to meet with President Jimmy Carter the next day. Mr. Arellano got on the guest list.

“The minute I got into the White House, I was nervous,” he said. “On the outside, I looked calm, but I was nervous inside. When are they going to ask me for my passport or green card? If they had, they would have learned I had an expired visa.”

He got his picture (Slide 5) and dashed.

“I almost ran out of there,” he said. “I went to the airport, since there was no way to transmit, got to New York at five, developed the picture, and it came out on the front page. I don’t know if Badillo ever learned I didn’t have my visa.”

One of El Diario’s owners, after learning of Mr. Arellano’s predicament, helped him straighten out his immigration status, and he has been a citizen since 1986. The intervening decade proved busy for him: he went overseas to cover the civil wars in Central America as increasing numbers of immigrants headed north.

On the cultural front, he covered singers and artists who were famous in Latin America but mostly unknown to English-speaking audiences. He got in early on the phenomenon that was the boy band Menudo. In fact, he grew close enough to the band, whose members at one time included Ricky Martin, that he opened Menuditis, a store devoted to all things Menudo (Slide 17).

The Columbia archive has some of those images, and a lot more. Frances Negrón-Muntaner, the archive’s curator and the director of the university’s Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, said the recently acquired collection was vastly different from anything found in an English-language newspaper. As the images are sorted, scanned and put online, she hopes other departments will build courses around them.

“When people engage with this archive, they will get a different sense of what life was like in New York,” Dr. Negrón-Muntaner said. “This collection offers a broader window into the community and the day-to-day impact on schools, politics, culture and the links of those communities to their home countries. It’s pretty significant.”

DESCRIPTIONPhoto by Bolívar Arellano Lilian Miranda Reyna, originally from Ponce, Puerto Rico, at Coney Island after being named “Queen of El Diario-La Prensa” in 1978.

Follow @dgbxny and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.



A Photographic Champion of Latinos

#flashHeader{visibility:visible !important;}

This is Puerto Rican Week in New York City, when flags cover cars, banners and bodies, accompanied by a two-three beat that sends spirits soaring. But in one newsroom, every week is Puerto Rican Week â€" and Colombian, Cuban, Dominican, Ecuadorean, Mexican and Salvadoran Week, too.

El Diario-La Prensa â€" the city’s storied Spanish-language newspaper, which is celebrating its centennial this year â€" has seen the city’s Latino population change from a predominantly Puerto Rican enclave to a broad representation of Latin America. Not content to stay on the sidelines, it, like other ethnic news publications, has been an advocate, proudly calling itself “el campeón de los Hispanos,” or “the champion of the Hispanics.”

DESCRIPTIONCourtesy of Bolívar Arellano Muhammad Ali and Bolívar Arellano in June 1971.

For some, like my cousin Charlie, it was the breakfast of champions. He would visit Mami with a copy of El Diario folded under his arm. Mami would brew café con leche and set it on the plastic-covered dining room table, and together they would read the paper. The ritual was set â€" read a story, dip a slice of Gouda into the coffee, savor the gooey cheese, talk. Lamenting the sad state of the world, or rejoicing at some Puerto Rican kid’s triumph, was optional.

Now a lot more people will be able to savor part of that experience, sans coffee and gooey Gouda, as Columbia University recently acquired 5,000 images spanning 40 years of El Diario’s photographic coverage. The collection, part of Columbia’s Latino Arts and Activism Archive, is a rich documentation of another world â€" albeit one that has existed in plain sight of New Yorkers.

“The narrative about our city is often stitched to yesteryear’s European migration, or today, to waves of hipsters, with a splash of color thrown in on occasion,” Erica Gonzalez, the paper’s executive editor, wrote in an e-mail. “In that context, Latinos have long been treated as an ‘other’ at best, or as a nuisance or invisible at worst. What you see in the photos, in the archives, is how Latinos have been part of the fabric of this city for a long time, not beginning when marketers ‘discovered’ us.”

Bolívar Arellano is among the stalwarts who have chronicled the good and the bad, both here and abroad. He worked as a freelance photographer for El Diario from 1974 to 1993, when he was hired as a staff photographer at The New York Post. (His brother, Humberto, remains at El Diario as a staff photographer.)

Mr. Arellano, now 68, arrived in New York in 1971 from his native Ecuador after receiving one threat too many from the military for digging into things it wanted to keep buried.

A friend who worked for The Associated Press in Ecuador gave him a letter of introduction to the wire service, which sent him out with English-speaking photographers to learn the ropes. That experience served him well when he arrived at El Diario and realized that the chief of photography did not have a police scanner and that the other photographers waited for assignments.

He bought a scanner.

“I listened to the radio for news,” he said, chuckling. “So, if 30 pictures ran in the paper, I had 20 of them.”

But he was guided by more than just what crackled over the airwaves. Knowing that the English-language press often looked only at crime and poverty in the Latino community, he looked for images that challenged those stereotypes. And even in his coverage of straight news, like campaign stops or civic events, he had his own focus.

DESCRIPTIONMatthew McDermott/The New York Post, courtesy of Bolívar Arellano Mr. Arellano on Sept. 11, 2001.

“During the mayor’s swearing-in, I would look for the Latinos,” Mr. Arellano said. “My primary objective was to always push Latinos ahead.”

Politicians, in turn, reached out to him when they had something big. In 1977, Representative Herman Badillo told him that he and other Hispanic lawmakers were going to meet with President Jimmy Carter the next day. Mr. Arellano got on the guest list.

“The minute I got into the White House, I was nervous,” he said. “On the outside, I looked calm, but I was nervous inside. When are they going to ask me for my passport or green card? If they had, they would have learned I had an expired visa.”

He got his picture (Slide 5) and dashed.

“I almost ran out of there,” he said. “I went to the airport, since there was no way to transmit, got to New York at five, developed the picture, and it came out on the front page. I don’t know if Badillo ever learned I didn’t have my visa.”

One of El Diario’s owners, after learning of Mr. Arellano’s predicament, helped him straighten out his immigration status, and he has been a citizen since 1986. The intervening decade proved busy for him: he went overseas to cover the civil wars in Central America as increasing numbers of immigrants headed north.

On the cultural front, he covered singers and artists who were famous in Latin America but mostly unknown to English-speaking audiences. He got in early on the phenomenon that was the boy band Menudo. In fact, he grew close enough to the band, whose members at one time included Ricky Martin, that he opened Menuditis, a store devoted to all things Menudo (Slide 17).

The Columbia archive has some of those images, and a lot more. Frances Negrón-Muntaner, the archive’s curator and the director of the university’s Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, said the recently acquired collection was vastly different from anything found in an English-language newspaper. As the images are sorted, scanned and put online, she hopes other departments will build courses around them.

“When people engage with this archive, they will get a different sense of what life was like in New York,” Dr. Negrón-Muntaner said. “This collection offers a broader window into the community and the day-to-day impact on schools, politics, culture and the links of those communities to their home countries. It’s pretty significant.”

DESCRIPTIONPhoto by Bolívar Arellano Lilian Miranda Reyna, originally from Ponce, Puerto Rico, at Coney Island after being named “Queen of El Diario-La Prensa” in 1978.

Follow @dgbxny and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.



Leak Investigations Are an Assault on the Press, and on Democracy, Too

This was supposed to be the administration of unprecedented transparency. President Obama promised that when he took office, and the White House’s Web site says so on this very day. It reads:

My administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in government.

Government should be transparent. Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their government is doing.

Instead, it’s turning out to be the administration of unprecedented secrecy and of unprecedented attacks on a free press. I wrote about the chilling effect of the Obama administration’s leak investigations - including the ramped-up criminal prosecution of those who provide information to the press â€" in a Sunday column in March.

Now that situation, already bad, has taken a major turn for the worse with revelations that the Obama Justice Department had secretly seized the phone records of a large number of journalists for The Associated Press, as part of a leak investigation.

While it may not be immediately apparent, readers have a big stake in this development.

Why should what happens to another news organization matter to Times readers?

For several reasons. Partly because the situation speaks directly to being able to know how your government operates. It’s hard to avoid sounding a little corny â€" all civics class and founding fathers â€" when talking about it: The ability of the press to report freely on its government is a cornerstone of American democracy. That ability is, by any reasonable assessment, under siege.

Reporters get their information from sources. They need to be able to protect those sources and sometimes offer them confidentiality. If they can’t be sure about that - and it looks increasingly like they can’t - the sources will dry up. And so will the information.

Sad to say, that seems to be exactly what the Justice Department has in mind with its leak investigations, two of which involve Times journalists. One has to do with the chief Washington correspondent David Sanger’s book and articles about American cyberattacks against Iran, the other is Scott Shane and Jo Becker’s article from last May about Mr. Obama’s “kill list.”

The Times’s executive editor, Jill Abramson, put it simply when I asked her about it Tuesday: “The press is supposed to hold government accountable. These investigations intrude on that process.”

The Times stories that are the subject of leak investigations “were in the great tradition of Washington reporting, helping people understand how decisions were made,” The Times’s newsroom lawyer, David McCraw, told me Tuesday. “There was no compromising of national security involved.”

“The net effect is universal,” he said. “People are less willing to talk, and that’s a loss for everyone.”

The Times is one of the many news and press rights organizations that signed a strongly worded letter sent to the Justice Department leadership on Tuesday.

This isn’t just about press rights. It’s about the right of citizens to know what their government is doing. In an atmosphere of secrecy and punishment - despite the hollow promises of transparency â€" that’s getting harder every day.



Readers Are Bothered by I.R.S. Coverage, an Amanda Knox Feature, and Too-Thin Models

Here’s the Monday roundup:

Many readers were critical of how The Times covered misdeeds by the Internal Revenue Service, which admitted targeting conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status with special scrutiny.

In essence, these readers believed The Times gave too little prominence to the story initially in Saturday’s paper and placed emphasis on the wrong aspect of the situation - the apology and the politics rather than the problem itself.

Separately, some readers were also perturbed by the Book Review’s decision to interview Amanda Knox in its “By the Book” feature. Ms. Knox is accused of killing her roommate in Italy and is the author of a new book, “Waiting to Be Heard.” And still others objected to the photograph of a young woman in a black swimsuit and a leather jacket on the cover of Sunday’s T Magazine.

Let’s take them one by one.

I.R.S. Coverage. A reader, Jack Liebau, was one of many who questioned The Times’s impartiality in reporting on the revelation that the I.R.S. had targeted conservative groups.

The Washington Post has the story as its lead on A1 this morning. The Boston Globe has it on Page A1, below the fold. The New York Times has the story on A11, below the fold. Do you think this placement would be the same if this had occurred in a Bush administration, and the story was the I.R.S. targeting liberal groups? Is the editorial decision regarding placement wrong by the Post or Globe â€" or was it yours? Is your decision-making process tainted in any way by a March 8, 2012 New York Times editorial, “I.R.S. does its job,” praising the I.R.S. in the way it treats “tea party groups”?

Another reader, Richard Crane, noted the emphasis in Monday’s article (which did appear on the front page) on the politics of the situation and asked, “Does New York Times report, or advocate?”

On Twitter, the veteran journalist Jeff Greenfield framed the question this way:

I agree that The Times seemed to play down the story originally, placing it inside the paper and emphasizing the second-day angle of the apology rather than the misconduct itself. In Monday’s paper, the headline, as Mr. Greenfield noted, emphasized the Republicans seizing on the issue rather than the widening problem. A Wall Street Journal front-page headline, by contrast, read, “Wider Problems Found at IRS.”

Many on the right - as noted last week in my blog posts about Benghazi - do not think they can get a fair shake from The Times. This coverage won’t do anything to dispel that belief.

Amanda Knox’s “By the Book” Feature. Jeff Dow of Waterloo, Iowa, was more tactful than many others in his comment on this feature in the Times Book Review on Sunday. He wrote: “I was surprised the Sunday Book Review chose Amanda Knox for the author profile. Not the type of author I expect from The Times.”

Faith McLellan, a French reader, wondered, “Is the editor really out of serious options?”

It did seem a strange choice to me, as well, reading almost like a parody, with questions like “What was your reading life in prison?” On Twitter, John Kubie had a similar thought:

Pamela Paul, the newly appointed editor of the Book Review, responded to my question as follows:

The general goal of “By the Book” is to show not only what seasoned writers are reading, but also to show the impact books have on the lives of writers new to the craft, musicians, artists, actors, politicians and other public figures. Ms. Knox, as a person whose life was so often in the public eye even as her private life remained unknown, struck us as an interesting choice. What a person chooses to read in prison is, of course, a perennially fascinating subject, and while other media outlets explored different aspects of Ms. Knox’s life and legal case, we thought readers of the Book Review might be interested in learning about this side of her.

The T Magazine Photographs. Some readers found the cover photo and inside display objectionable because of their suggestions of bondage. (A summary read: “Harnessing the dark side with black bikinis and a leather cover-up.”) Others were disturbed by the youth and extreme slenderness of the cover model.

Jane Sherman of Westport, Conn., wrote:

My reaction to the cover of the Sunday New York Times Style Magazine, which I sent to the editor Deborah Needleman, is: “Where did you get this child for your cover? The photo represents kiddy porn and I object.”

Even if the model is over 18 (and I’m sure she is, to be legal) the makeup, stance, clothing and her very youthful appearance make the image one of a child in provocative dress with an adult message. Where is her mother? I’m a long time print subscriber to The New York Times and I don’t want to read a newspaper that’s moving into sleaze for dirty old men.

Meredith Wheeler, a reader who lives in France and described herself as a former writer and producer at ABC News, wrote:

As a woman, I was infuriated to see the current cover of T Magazine, which featured an anorexic-looking model. The additional photos in the shoot featured in the magazine were of similar super-thin models â€" and this on Mother’s Day weekend, when we should be celebrating some more realistic picture of womanhood. Haven’t we moved beyond this? Hasn’t the debate in fashion over the promotion of these wretchedly thin models been thoroughly discussed? Do we really have to fight this issue within The New York Times in 2013?

Deborah Needleman, T Magazine editor, responded with the following when I shared the reaction with her:

I’ve gotten a lot of comments from people loving the images!

Julia Nobis, the model, is a 20-year-old undergraduate studying medicine. We chose her because of her strong looks and the personality she is able to project. She is rather thin for my taste, as most models are, and I considered adding some fat to her with Photoshop, but decided that as it is her body, I’d let it be. Fashion photography involves a bit of fantasy, and often some edge, and while the bathing suits are strappy and have buckles, that is a far cry from bondage â€" either showing it or advocating it. “Fifty Shades of Grey” is racier and more explicit than these images.

Although I certainly understand the readers’ objections, I found the photographs arresting but pretty mild, especially by today’s fashion magazine standards.

3:56 p.m. | Updated  Ms. Needleman’s reference to Photoshopping has raised some questions about how photographs are treated in The Times, including in its magazines. I’ll be looking into this, so stay tuned.



For Extra Credit: A Little Light Reading on Press Rights

With press rights very much in the news this week, here are some of the most noteworthy pieces I’ve come across on the subject.

1. Molly Redden of The New Republic writes that there really is a chilling effect on journalism from the Justice Department’s leak investigations, quoting the investigative journalist Jane Mayer: “It’s a huge impediment to reporting, and so ‘chilling’ isn’t quite strong enough. It’s more like freezing the whole process into a standstill.”

2. David A. Kaplan of Fortune magazine, who teaches First Amendment law at New York University, says the press should stop whining: “From the government’s perspective, lawlessness is a bad thing, and disclosure of secrets can endanger security. When the Justice Department, legally (so far as we know), wants to obtain evidence to prove law-breaking, it seems to me the press is entitled to no special protection.”

3. The former New York Times counsel James Goodale, writing in The Daily Beast, compares President Obama’s record on press rights to that of President Richard Nixon and recalls that Mr. Obama “deep-sixed” the press shield law he is now proposing.

4. Frank Rich of New York Magazine, formerly a Times columnist, calls the seizure of Associated Press phone records “the scandal with legs” for the president.

5. Thomas Stackpole of Mother Jones, with information from the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, details the six indictments of government leakers during the Obama administration.

6. The New Yorker’s general counsel, Lynn Oberlander, analyzes the A.P. phone records case from a legal perspective: “Even beyond the outrageous and overreaching action against the journalists, this is a blatant attempt to avoid the oversight function of the courts.”

7. Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution, writing for National Review Online, summarizes the recent troubles in the Obama administration: “ ‘Hope and change’ is fast becoming the 1973 Nixon White House.”

8. Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian writes about the media’s sudden interest in civil liberties, coming rather late in the troubled game, as he notes. In short, he writes, the issue is catching fire now because media organizations are now in the crosshairs: “It is remarkable how media reactions to civil liberties assaults are shaped almost entirely by who the victims are.”

A note to readers: My Sunday print column in the Review section examines and explains The Times’s policy on photographic integrity. After that, I’ll be off the grid for a few days.



Sunday Column: Tattoo Removal on the Photo Desk

Tattoo Removal on the Photo Desk

A POWERFUL picture taken by the Swedish photographer Paul Hansen last year, of men carrying the bodies of dead children through the streets of Gaza City, was artfully composed and filled with anguish.

But was it authentic? After it won a prestigious award, selected photo of the year by World Press Photo, questions arose about whether it was a digitally altered composite. Mr. Hansen denied that, and last week, World Press Photo confirmed that the image was genuine.

The challenge to the photo, called “Gaza Burial,” illustrates a point: In news photography, manipulation of images is strictly forbidden. At The Times, such rules have been stated and vigorously enforced for many years. Whether from the South Bronx or Syria, news photos must represent unaltered reality.

That hasn’t changed, but in one corner of The Times, different rules prevail.

I stumbled across this last week when I wrote a blog post about readers’ objections to a fashion photo spread in T, the monthly style magazine. I asked its editor, Deborah Needleman, about one objection: that the cover model was too skinny. She responded that she, too, felt that many models were too thin, and with this one she had considered “adding some fat to her with Photoshop.”

John Schwartz, a Times reporter, was among the first to react. On Twitter, he called her comment “jaw-dropping.” That reflected how deeply most journalists feel about the integrity of photographs.

“That is inviolate, and the standards are very clear,” Michele McNally, assistant managing editor for photography, told me. The Times does not stage news photographs, or alter them digitally.

But Times editors see the fashion photography in T as an exception. “Fashion is fantasy,” Ms. McNally said. “Readers understand this. It’s totally manipulated, with everything done for aesthetics.”

Philip B. Corbett, the associate managing editor for standards, agreed. “This is a different genre of photography,” he said. “It has different goals, different tools and techniques, and there is a different expectation on the part of the reader.”

When I followed up with Ms. Needleman, she too said that fashion magazines abided by different standards than news organizations do. In T’s fashion photography, she confirmed, “images are sometimes retouched,” she said. “Red taken out of someone’s eye, a wrinkle in a skirt smoothed, a model’s tattoo removed.” But even within T, various standards prevail. Only with “fashion/glamour photography” is manipulation allowable, she said. A travel article or personality profile would be subject to traditional rules.

These Times editors agree that readers’ expectations are important here. After all, no one opens Vogue with the expectation that they’re seeing Gisele Bundchen looking like she does when she wakes up. In a 2009 article in The Times, the style writer Eric Wilson noted how pervasive photo alteration was at fashion magazines: “It now seems fresh, even exclamation-worthy, when a magazine presents an unvarnished image.”

The editors are confident that readers know the difference.

But here’s the catch: T magazine is still a New York Times editorial product. Although it generates (and is intended to generate) plenty of advertising revenue, its content is not “advertorial,” that strange hybrid that looks like journalism but is actually advertising copy. T is produced by journalists who are part of the newsroom structure, and readers might reasonably have the expectations that standards are the same across the board.

I asked Stuart Emmrich, editor of the Styles section, about fashion photography there. He responded that Styles adheres to traditional rules: “We strictly forbid any altering or manipulation of photos that have been shot for Styles, including fashion shoots.” I heard the same from Kathy Ryan, director of photography for The Times Magazine, which also allows no manipulation. (In all cases, minor color-toning and brightening for production purposes are acceptable.)

Photos from outside sources may have been altered before they reach The Times, Mr. Emmrich said. “We can’t control everything, but our photo editor does look closely to see if she can spot any heavy retouching,” he said.

And sometimes, in various parts of The Times, the label “photo illustration” on what Ms. Ryan calls a “high-concept” picture makes it clear that this is not a rendering of reality. It is all part of making sure readers know that what they are looking at is authentic.

Granted, a dramatic news photo from the streets of Gaza is a far cry from a magazine’s fashion spread. Maybe readers intuitively get the difference. But they may not. In the words of one surprised reader, Fred Zimmerman, “Is such doctoring allowed at The Times?”

Newspaper people sometimes assume too much about what readers know â€" for example, the difference between the opinions expressed in editorials and those expressed by a news-page columnist, or even the difference between a staff-written obituary and a paid death notice.

It would be best if all the photography produced by the Times newsroom could be held to the same standard. If that is deemed unrealistic for some parts of a fashion magazine, some transparency (and not the kind that has to do with gossamer fabrics) is needed. For example, a brief statement in each issue of T stating its photo practices would help.

Being forthcoming with readers is the answer to many of journalism’s trickiest questions. The world of fashion photography â€" where a waistline may shrink or a tattoo may disappear at the tweak of a few pixels â€" is distinctive in many ways, but not in that one.

-

In last week’s Public Editor’s Journal, I wrote about the Justice Department’s secret seizure of phone records from Associated Press journalists and its negative effect on a free press.

Follow the public editor on Twitter at twitter.com/sulliview and read her blog at publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com.  The public editor can also be reached by e-mail: public@nytimes.com.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on May 19, 2013, on page SR12 of the New York edition with the headline: Tattoo Removal on the Photo Desk.

The Times’s Role in Anthony Weiner’s Redemption Tour

When Anthony D. Weiner announced his candidacy for mayor of New York City recently â€" and rather oddly, in a video that surfaced online late at night and then disappeared â€" it was good to see the reporter David Halbfinger take a hard look at the video’s assertions, fact-checking them aggressively and in real time.

For example, Mr. Halbfinger wrote about the candidate’s claim of a health care overhaul, “Mr. Weiner’s go-it-alone style in Congress - and his razor-sharp verbal bite - earned him hours of television airtime and a national following among liberals, but little else to show for it.”

The editorial writer Lawrence Downes also offered an incisive view in the “Taking Note” blog. “The half-life of disgrace seems to be getting shorter,” he wrote. “The new Anthony Weiner looks a lot like the old: full of bluster, full of ideas, full of himself.”

And the reporter Michael Barbaro wrote an analytical piece soon after, raising questions and describing the strange quality of the campaign thus far. With poll numbers showing “a deep distaste for his candidacy,” Mr. Weiner “remained holed up in his apartment” after his announcement. Mr. Barbaro wrote, “His campaign seemed determined that the warm images from the video be the ones that dominated the day.”

This kind of hard-nosed skepticism has sometimes been in short supply in recent weeks when it comes to the former congressman, who resigned in June 2011 after an online sex scandal, and in his run for New York City’s top office.

It all began with a cover story in The New York Times Magazine on April 14. The cover image, combined with the headline’s first-name intimacy, gave it something of a Brangelina vibe: “Huma and Anthony: The Private Life of a Former Power Couple.” Mr. Weiner’s wife is Huma Abedin, a longtime top aide to Hillary Rodham Clinton and close friend of the Clinton family.

Joan G. Hauser, a reader, was one of many who objected. “I found the Sunday piece offensive because it was a blatant ‘testing of the water’ for the benefit of Weiner.” Notably, the story was written not by one of The Times’s political reporters but by a Vogue contributing editor.

Joseph Brennan of Somers, N.Y., wrote to me:

I am surprised and disappointed at the recent, generally positive, articles that have appeared about Anthony Weiner and his apparent attempt to re-establish himself as a significant political figure. Based on the descriptions in New York Times articles of his activities and influence I see no basis for the conclusion. Indeed, considering the lack of similar coverage in other reputable publications I can’t escape the conclusion that The Times is single-handedly engineering his comeback.

I asked Hugo Lindgren, the editor of The Times Magazine, about the impression, by some readers, that the cover story was too easy on its subjects â€" a sweet stop on Mr. Weiner’s redemption tour â€" and about the choice of its author.

He responded that, in retrospect, he did not believe the story was too soft.

We were very clear with our readers about the reason that Weiner and Abedin were cooperating with us, and our primary goal was to get them to speak as unguardedly as possible about the Twitter episode and its effect on them personally and professionally. We think we accomplished that. At the time, Weiner had not announced his run for mayor. Now that he has, the conversation has moved on to whether he is fit for the office, and our colleagues in the newsroom have done an excellent job of covering that.

I’d like to make one additional point about the writer of the story, Jonathan Van Meter. Jonathan is a highly respected magazine journalist who has written political profiles for Vogue and New York Magazine, and though he was acquainted with Abedin because he had written about the Clintons, he was not “cozy” with her or Weiner.

Whatever one thinks of the magazine cover story - some, no doubt, simply enjoyed it as a juicy read - the tone of The Times’s coverage of Mr. Weiner has toughened up. That’s a welcome development.



Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)