Newspapers and the Haiti earthquake

Earlier tonight, I tweeted: "Maybe it's just the designer in me, but I want to run every one of these Haiti pictures as big as possible to show people the devastation." I was designing an inside page with a couple stories about the Haiti earthquake on them and I kept coming back to a statement from Denis Finley, the editor of The Virginian-Pilot, that was on Charles Apple's blog a few days ago. He was addressing the usage of a photo of a dead person on 1A and said, "We believe this photograph captures the anguish and the toll better than any words ever could."

That stuck with me.

Sometimes in the world of newspapers, we get too caught up in trying to give the readers as many stories and as many words as we can, which is no easy task in these days of shrinking page sizes. The power of a photograph is often lost now. The editors and designers at The Virginian-Pilot (always stellar in these situations) clearly knew that this was the kind of situation where readers would be best served if the newspaper didn't get in its own way and just let a picture tell the story instead.

At the Democrat and Chronicle, we ran a photo of a relief worker holding a baby, found alive in the rubble, on Sunday. Really, the photo represented nothing short of a miracle. Out of all the chaos and all the devastation in Haiti, this tiny life survived and was found. A glimmer of hope. Unfortunately, we were only able to run it on an inside page and only at two columns wide. Were the accompanying stories important? I'm sure they were. Would this one picture have had the same impact as 300 lines of story? Without a doubt, I'm sure.

One of the downfalls of a physical newspaper, I guess. Sometimes it's impossible to run the photo with all the impact in the world the way we should.