Today, my breakfast was pretty ordinary. I padded out to the sidewalk and picked up my
St. Petersburg Times and then sat down to breakfast. This is part of my morning ritual. It was a fairly typical front page until I noticed the headline "U.S. releases grisly pictures."
I ignored everything else and started looking for the photos.
The Times chose to run them inside in black and white. A reasonable choice for this community. Not too graphic while being informative.
Poynter's Al Tompkins wrote a piece yesterday for Poynter Online that offered tips for making the tough call about how to use these graphic images. I encourage you to read the article and check out the feedback area to see what people are saying.
How newspapers used the images varied widely around the world. I noticed that my perception of how graphic the images were depended on placement, how intense the colors were, and size. The most striking thing to me was the difference in the color quality from paper to paper.
The Daily Telegraph in London had the most vivid red blood of any of the front pages I looked at. It was further emphasized by their use of bright red type in the promos above the photos. It kind of has the effect of blood splatter. I don't see this paper often enough to say whether red headlines on their promos are their style, but I think it was an unfortunate choice. I comes off looking like they are serving up today's entertainment news.
As a learning experience, consider the thumbnails of the pages below and use them as a way to talk about the use of graphic images. Discuss how all the content on the page can play a role in the perception of images.
Since the links below are updated at the Newseum every day, they no longer show the page with the Hussein images. But you can click the links to see what each paper has on its front today.
