Jeff Sonderman
Mar. 7, 2013
11:14 am
To update an old saying for the Twitter era: A picture is worth a thousand characters.
Research by Twitter shows that tweets that include a photo or video receive 3 to 4 times more engagement (retweets, replies, etc.) than those … Read more
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Jeff Sonderman
Feb. 7, 2013
7:23 am
Maybe you have a Web CMS that requires an image to be associated with some stories. Maybe you just need some kind of image, any image, to color an otherwise gray slate of text.
Whatever the reason, many news websites … Read more
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Julie Moos
Feb. 6, 2012
7:34 am
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Steve Myers
Jan. 26, 2012
8:30 am
AndrewBayley.net | Irresponsible Architecture
Architecture student Andrew Bayley came up with an illustration of Chicago's confusing political districts that any graphic artist or political journalist would be proud of: a
jigsaw puzzle, with one piece for each of the city's 50 wards.
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- Chicago's wards, literally pieces of a puzzle. (Image used with permission.)
"Just because I have chosen to focus on this pursuit professionally,"
he wrote, "does not mean I pay no attention to other things that affect us urban dwellers."
(more...)
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Julie Moos
Jan. 23, 2012
6:56 am
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Julie Moos
Jan. 6, 2012
7:36 am
The latest issue of Time magazine, hitting newsstands today, echoes an earlier Mitt Romney cover to revisit ongoing questions about the candidate's popularity.
"If this week's cover feels a little familiar, there's good reason for that,"
writes managing editor Rick Stengel in a letter to readers. "In early December, we put Mitt Romney on the cover and asked, "
Why Don't They Like Me?"—a question that has been at the heart of the GOP primary process.
"This week, in the wake of Romney’s razor-thin win in Iowa,
we’ve updated and revised the question, using the other half of the same portrait of Romney. The first cover got a lot of attention, not least from Governor Romney himself, who began annotating the cover for those who asked him to sign it."
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- The January 16, 2012 cover of Time magazine (right) echoes the magazine's December 12, 2011 cover (left) with an image taken from the same photo.
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Steve Myers
Dec. 2, 2011
2:37 pm
Society for News Design | Imprint | The New York Times
In a 2004 essay (which SND republished Friday) Phil Ritzenberg wrote that former New York Times art director Louis Silverstein, who died Thursday, "helped pave the way for newspaper designers to be valued as participants in newspaper journalism, even at tradition-bound institutions, and to help silence the tedious debate about art people versus word people."
Charles Apple writes, "You’d be amazed at the list of things we accept today as standard features of print newspapers that Silverstein invented over his decades at the Times." Among the many bits of journo-trivia
in the Times' obit is this fact: Silverstein dropped the period from Times' nameplate in 1967, saving the newspaper $45 a year in ink.
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Jeff Sonderman
Oct. 14, 2011
2:45 pm
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Steve Myers
Oct. 11, 2011
12:20 pm
The Cagle Post | ABC News
Daryl Cagle writes that all those cartoons portraying Steve Jobs in heaven are ironic, considering
he was influenced so much by Buddhism: "We often see editorial cartoonists imposing Christian imagery on non-Christians when they die. (After all, only one religion can be right, huh?) Comedian George Carlin, a famous atheist, found a Christian heaven in many editorial cartoons. When Beatle George Harrison, a Hindu, died, the editorial cartoonists drew dozens of cartoons with George showing up in Christian heaven." Cartoons portraying Jobs in heaven were the most popular among the ones Cagle syndicates; he published several of them on his blog. ||
Related: Commenters criticize The New Yorker for its cover portraying Saint Peter checking Steve Jobs into heaven with an iPad.
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Steve Myers
Oct. 11, 2011
9:41 am
The Visual Side of Journalism
The Times-News of Twin Falls, Idaho ran a
full-page illustration on its Sunday opinion section front that
fact-checked, point-by-point, a press release from Republican Senator Mike Crapo.
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- This page appeared as a section front on the Sunday, Oct. 9 opinion section.
The newspaper tells readers that it gets dozens of press releases every day; before publishing them, "we also like to check all releases for both spin and accuracy before we publish them." In this release, Crapo's office announced
legislation to cap the capital gains and dividend tax rate. The newspaper says the release's description of a "guaranteed" tax from the health care overhaul is a "half truth" because most people will never pay it. Crapo's office uses percentage increase figures that "sound pretty scary," one of which is calculated by assuming the highest tax rates, which don't apply to most people. And the release throws in a reference to farmers and ranchers that seems like a "heavy-handed way to pander to rural Idahoans" who generally aren't subject to the tax. The newspaper concludes that although the release is factual, "the data is also spun harder than it should be," and it calls on politicians to avoid "the most hyperbolic of methods to crunch statistics." ||
Related: PolitiFact asks its readers: Should ‘Barely True’ rating be changed to ‘Mostly False’?
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