February 17, 2003
News about the war
Mainstream news sites provide only a limited range of perspectives on the upcoming war with Iraq. Here are some other views and perspectives:
Anti-war organizations:
UnitedforPeace.org
SF Indymedia
Moveon.org
IraqWar.info
Antiwar.com
Wagingpeace.org
Citiesforpeace.org
Commondreams.org
epic-usa.org
PoetsAgainstWar.org
Foreign news sites:
DAWN (Pakistan)
www.haaretz.co.il (Israel)
DEBKA
The Kashmir Times
Blog link exchange
If you write about current events, online news, tech news, new media, journalism -- or just have a really cool weblog -- drop me a line.
If we exchange links, I'll include your blog in the list of Webloggers at the right, and from time to time I'll link to items in your weblog. (It's helpful if you drop me a line when you want to spotlight something.)
Contact me here.
rusty said:
I have been wondering for some time if you were ever going to link to K5. :-)
PS: Love the MT blog. You may expect many more comments from me now that they're not out there in the manilasites commenting ghetto hell.
JD Lasica said:
R-
I've been ambivalent for a long time about whether to link to big community weblogs like K5 or Slashdot. I don't see many other bloggers doing it. But I decided that you're right, and the fact that it's a team effort shouldn't be a reason not to. So: a new subheading called community news.
As for the postings: Couldn't agree more. I've been arguing with web designers since at least 1998 that no one will bother to post comments if they're invisible on the top layer. MT seems to be on the right track.
Looking forward to your ramblings.
Composite photo in the Merc
I was surprised to see a composite news photograph in this morning's San Jose Mercury News. The back page of the A section contained a large photo that showed some of the 200,000-plus protestors at yesterday's anti-war rally in San Francisco. (The image isn't available on the MercuryNews.com site, natch. The photo was by Jim Gensheimer.) The cutline said:
In a panoramic composite of two photographs, Elias Rashmawi points skyward while addressing a mass of anti-war demonstrators gathered with flags and signs in Civic Center Plaza on Sunday.
I sent an email to the Merc's reader liaison, assistant managing editor David Tepps, this morning, and he quickly responded, writing:
"I wasn't here yesterday, but I suspect the reason was because we wanted to show the vastness of the crowd and could not do it in one photo. We have received some criticism about our coverage of the anti-war protests from people who say we have not adequately shown the scope of the events.
The use of a composite photograph generally is considered controversial only when it is not revealed. Although it is not something we do often."
If that's the case -- that it's become acceptable to create composite news montages as long as it's disclosed -- that's news to me. I wrote about digital imaging in 1988 with the help of George Wedding, then the Director of Photography of the Sacramento Bee, and former Director of Photography for the Mercury News, ironically. Wedding was adamantly opposed to this kind of digital trickery, and I doubt he would have blessed its use in a news photo just to get a more dramatic effect.
Later: Matt Mansfield, another AME, emailed to say:
The photo is two images taken seconds apart. There is no intention to deceive anyone because we left the seem in where the two frames meet (almost mid-section, where you see the buildings not perfectly connecting). We also clearly say that the photo is a composite in the caption. Why do it? As Dave Tepps said, it is an effort to show the size of the crowd in a way we were not lensed to do at that event. We had just one photographer covering it.
Interesting. I'm not saying this was unethical or egregious, and disclosure takes care of it, for the most part. I just hope we don't see composite news photos become the norm.
