LECTURE

Philip Gefter and Ira Rosen

Gefter:  . . . selecting both stories and pictures for the front page of the New York Times.  I’ll tell you a little bit about the structure of it, and then I’ll show you a days’ work, and then I’ll show you the paper.  I’ll do this and try to be as brief and concise as I can be.

The structure of the daily paper.  There are two meetings a day for page one.  There’s a noon meeting and then there’s a 4:30 page one meeting.  At both meetings, all the top editors are there.  There are the executive editor, managing editor, assistant managing editors, and then what we call the desk heads--they are the editors of their respective news desks.  So, the national editor, foreign editor, metro, culture, sports, etc., and myself.  Now I’m not the head of the picture desk, there’s a director of photography, but I am the one who sits at that table every day at 4:30 and I will present what I think are the best pictures of the day.  What happens in these meetings in the morning, each desk head talks about the several stories they think might be page one-able, for let’s say, tomorrow’s paper.  I’m going to go to the noon meeting with I leave here, and each editor will talk about that, and off the top of my head without even getting to work yet, that there are several likely page one, top of page one stories.  Sharon is meeting with Bush, for example, I know that that’s likely to get major play, and could be a lead story.  There’s the US Open which is taking place in our vicinity, which is a big deal--that could be the bottom of the page.  So I can walk in at noon and assume that the top picture could likely be George Bush with Sharon, and the bottom picture could be a golf picture.  Now that can change.  That can change for any number of reasons.  At the noon meeting every editor pitches the top few stories.  From that, I leave that meeting at about 12:30, and I have my script of the afternoon.  I know what the top stories are that are going to be offered for national, metro, foreign, all the desks.  I spend the rest of the afternoon, until 4:30, basically looking through about 1,000 pictures. They come from three sources.  One, the wires, French Press, Reuters, and Associated Press, they come in.  Everything ends up in our network so I can see it on my desktop; I can see every picture that comes in on my computer screen.  I don’t have to leave my desk, and I rarely do, unfortunately.  The wire pictures are divided into domestic, international, sports and entertainment, I believe.  That’s one source.  The second source is our staff photographers of which there are 30 in New York City, two in Washington, and one in Los Angeles.  Then I look at their pictures for stories they’ve either done feature stories or the stories that they are shooting today.  I’ll look at them over the course of the day as they come in.  The third source are photographers who we assign, freelancers, nationally and internationally.  The way I know about a lot of these pictures is that there are probably 28 picture editors at the New York Times.  There are two picture editors on national, two on foreign, two on metro--they’re divided by weekday and weekend but at any one time, there is a picture editor on every news desk.  So I can go to them and say, “There’s this story on alligator snaring,” which was actually on the front page yesterday.  “What kind of pictures did you assign for this and can I see them?”  And they’re either good enough or not good enough, and maybe we’ll hold the story and have it re-shot, that kind of thing.  So over the course of the day, I will have conferred with the respective picture editors, I will have looked through all the wires.  I consider myself the curator of the pictures of the day.  Out of 1,000 pictures I will assemble in a portfolio, which I’ll show you in a couple of minutes, perhaps 20-30 pictures.  So at 4:30 I go into the page-one meeting and every desk head is there offering their best stories of the day, and at the end of the time, I then talk about the pictures that I’ve put up.  Let’s see.  What happened?  Did it stop?  It was on.  (Computer problems)  Any questions so far?

While we wait, let me talk to you a little bit about--people think that there’s always a strategy or a particular agenda with the media in general, and the New York Times in particular.  And no matter who you are, you bring your entire worldview to reading the New York Times, so we get letters constantly, angry phone calls about our coverage of you name it.  Israel, Palestine, the Muslims, homophobia, homosexuality, you name it.  Constantly people are calling us saying we have a particular agenda, that we’re a part of the liberal press.  Some of us actually think we’re part of the right wing.  So go figure.  This is something that I find laughable.

Younger:  Yeah, but don’t you bring your own agendas to it in some ways?

Gefter:  I have learned over the years to try to be as objective as I can possibly be.  And that’s all I can do.  And that’s all we try to do.  I think that we are not always objective, I think in fact there is a chorus of subjective voices that collectively bring us to a level of objectivity, and I guess that’s the best way I can describe it.  That we’re never going to achieve absolute platonic truth in the media.  It’s just not going to happen.  But, we aspire to that every day, and that’s all we can do.  And yes, I bring my own biases, and yes I bring my particular interests to what I show in the page one meeting every day.  For example, I think we end up defaulting to pictures of George Bush all the time, so I try to show as much variety as I can so that maybe there are ways of covering the president without actually showing his picture every single day.  That’s my particular approach.  In the end we end up running pictures of him often, in fact I’m going to show you one when we get started. 

Audience:  Can you tell us what input the picture side has into the selection of what actually gets assigned or put into the paper?  What coverage.

Gefter:  The picture disk more and more has a hand in the kind of coverage, in what we cover, but I would say that we don’t necessarily generate stories, or we don’t necessarily determine the coverage of Bush in Moscow, for example.  However, let me answer it a different way.  I would say that more and more we have a hand in the kind of photo coverage we end up using, and that’s a big step from ten years ago when the New York Times and most newspapers just ran what I call “proof of the story” pictures.  That basically prove what’s already in the story, and don’t take you further and don’t give you greater insight or open a window onto what the story is.  I don’t know if that answers your question or side steps it.  We will generate picture stories more, picture essays, but I can’t very well say, “I don’t think that’s a lead story,” I can’t sit there at the conference table and say, “That’s not important and this is important.”  I can only do so in terms of talking about the pictures I have basically put together.  And that collection, which you’ll hopefully see, is pretty much my choice.  I can go into the meeting and out of 1,000 or so pictures that come in every day, and I’ve selected 20, and they pretty much accept that that’s my edit and those are the best pictures of the day, and probably the most appropriate pictures for the news and/or something that’s completely serendipitous, let’s say.  I might see a picture over the wires or one of our photographers might have gone out and shot a “day picture,” we call them.  I try not to call them “stand alone” as opposed to “day” because “day pictures” seem like they’re weather pictures and we’re trying to get away from that.  I can show them and I can say this is apropos of absolutely nothing, but it reflects a particular mood or it has its own narrative, and we can use it sometimes.

Audience:  Could you talk a little more about that stylistic shift?

 

Gefter:  I have the program on mine.  It’s been a subtle shift over the last ten years.  Basically, I think everyone has come to recognize that you have an opportunity to tell a story in a different way through photographs, and why simply show proof of what’s already in the story.  That’s the way I’ve actually articulated this for ten years at the Times, my colleagues and me; that there’s an entire narrative in the photograph that can be parallel to or independent of the story that we’re writing about.  So we try as much as we can to reach for that.  I think also, my sense is that, well here’s what I think as well.  Words are cerebral; pictures are visceral, and I think you need them both to tell the whole story.  Basically.  And I think while no one’s articulated it that way, at The Times I think they’ve all come to implicitly understand that.  Word editors don’t necessarily see pictures.  What they do is look at a picture and it becomes a collection of facts for that.  It goes through their brain before they can understand, “oh yes, that’s a picture of a suicide bomber on the ground with blood everywhere.”  But they had to go through this mental process--“Oh, disaster, blood, people scrambling.  Ah, that’s a suicide bomber.”  So that’s a different process.  I can look at a picture and instantly viscerally see it for what it is.  A lot of word editors, particularly journalists, it’s hard for them because they’re kind of constantly seeing the fact within.  I’m rambling.  Any questions?

Younger:  Let’s assume that this is not going to go, and let’s try to talk about it.  They may get it, but let’s try. . .  There’s a question back there.

Audience:  I’m wondering what sort of process the photographs go through before they get to your desk.  What sort of captions do they come with?

Gefter:  That’s a very good question.  We have vowed on the Wires for years to be absolutely accurate in caption information, but they’re not always.  Even our freelancers sometimes aren’t completely accurate or thorough in their caption writing.  I say I have basic confidence in the Wires, less so in some of our freelancers, but we ask the appropriate question, if there’s any question at all, and I’m so attuned to some kind of potential discrepancy in it, in something I see in the picture and something I’m reading in the caption.  And if I’m not, other people are.  It does go through several processes, several stages, so if we decide to use a picture it then goes to a copy editor to write a caption, the caption information is there with the picture, and sometimes I will include more information that the photographer gave us, but the caption writer is also the copy editor, so they’re fact-checkers, and they’re really, they’re like editorial surgeons and they have very good antenna for the most part, so they’ll catch it if I don’t.  Several people see the picture and the caption before it ends up in the paper, so there’s that check and balance.

Audience:  I’m having trouble with this word “objectivity” and “photograph” together.  Because if you’re pitching a story and you tell the photographers to go out there and submit photographs that would tell the story, don’t you already define what’s going to be photographed?  And this objectivity part, the photographer is going to know that this is the New York Times, so they should . . . in your head, if you’re taking a photograph for the Wall Street Journal or some other newspapers, how does objectivity work?  And then they submit it to you and then you make the decision.

Gefter:  Like I said, I don’t think we ever reach pure truth.  Or pure objectivity.  I think all we can do is, to me, objectivity is the chorus of subjective voices in a way, but these subjective voices are also very experienced and are aspiring to report what is.  That’s all they can really try to do.  On what level is, well, it’s almost like what Bill Clinton said.  It’s a question of what the meaning of “is” is.  It’s a good question.  I don’t have the answer to what is truly objective.  I get the point of the question.  Yes, it’s the New York Times.  Yes, we hire certain kinds of photographers, but what we try to do is hire people who don’t meddle with what it is they’re shooting unless it’s a portrait, and portraiture is a different kind of animal altogether.  (Discussion of computer problems)

Audience:  After a graduate education in photography and spending some time with this program and doing some reading, I got stuck in a post-modern feedback loop and thinking How could I ever be objective?  There’s objectivity--my subjectivity is evil.  Even as a black male, when I would go up to photograph a working-class black church, I was trying to interrogate my blah, blah, blah.  And at a certain point I realized that what I brought to a story was a certain about of integrity.  Like I can never understand the lesbian experience or the Latino experience.  I can’t feel it, but I have integrity and I think I’m going to be honest about my biases.  A photographer goes out and photographs what he or she thinks is newsworthy and interesting, and I think that when Philip said they strive to have a chorus of subjectivity, you’re going to have someone, a photographer or editor, who might be drawn to the Palestinian side of suffering and someone else who might be drawn to the Israeli side of suffering, and I’m sure there’s someone in-between, but maybe that person in-between is on vacation.  The fact that you have those two people at the table who can say you’re this, you’re that, I think is a healthy thing because there is no one person who’s going to say they’re perfectly neutral on all things.  I think that’s what the news media used to try to tell us and it was all the same people telling us what we should know.

Younger:  I have one question.  Sometimes I’ll see Hilary Clinton and there’s her---then there’s this big boom coming out over her head that’s been included in the picture, and it almost connotes to the caption.  I actually remember that one picture as saying something more than what the article was saying or what the picture was saying.  Do you engage that in trying to . . . Because you’re obviously very visually literate, and as one that picks these pictures and probably sees these things that the writers don’t see. . .

Gefter:  I’m aware of that.  I think our picture editors are aware of the implications of a big boom dangling over the head of the First Lady or Senator Clinton.  We know that, and we will try, I will try not to use a picture like that, but if that is the only picture of the day that’s come in from the wires, then what I might try to do is crop it out.

Younger:  Yeah, well it was cropped in.  It was like here, and it was enough that you’d have to.

Gefter:  Some of that is accidental, some of that is sloppiness, that’s all I can say.  We don’t intend to make people look silly.  That is not the intention of the New York Times.  We tend not to try to goof on anybody.  We can all talk about our coverage of all sorts of issues, we can talk about our coverage of Bill Clinton.  I have very strong views about it; I don’t necessarily agree with some of our coverage of him in the last few years, but that’s me.  I’m one person.  I think it runs the gamot in the page one conference room every day.  You could go around the table and everybody would have a different view of our actual coverage.  But what we all try to do collectively is arrive at some consensus of wisdom.  It’s like the philosopher kings at work.  For better or worse.  I can’t say that it’s right that all of them should be making these decisions, but basically I respect everyone I work with.  They do have a great deal of integrity and they try.  Anyway, I don’t need to, I mean I feel like I’m being defensive, I don’t mean to.

Audience:  With this age of digital photography and you get a lot over the Wire, how much digital manipulation is acceptable, if any? 

Gefter:  None.  We might at times, if we were to obscure something in a picture, let’s say there’s a picture that has such historic resonance, like a particular suicide bombing, where somebody of great importance might have been killed and it’s the only picture at that moment, and you see nudity or naked body parts, we might obscure them and say so in the caption.  Just say for whatever reason we have obscured certain extremely graphic elements of this picture.  We might do something like that, but there is never, we never, at least to our knowledge, at least that we are cognoscente of, we would never manipulate anything or do it in a way to mislead our readers at all.

Audience:  Computer not supported.  Would you like to try other computer?

Gefter:  Well the thing is that the software program that’s on this cannot be transferred.

Younger:  What we could do is have Ira go and then maybe have some questions for you two at the end?  And if he can get it to work. . .

Gefter:  If you want to do that, that’s great. 

Ira Rosen:  I’m currently the senior producer for Prime Time Thursday, I’m also Executive Producer of Webcasts for ABCNEWS.com, so what I’m going to do is try to tailor my remarks to what I think will help you the most.  I won’t try to give you a primer on television news at this point, but what I’ll try to do is give you the state of the business of High Eight TV/Video and DVD cameras and things like that.  What we do is we’re not covering the hard news of the day, what we’re doing is more of a magazine program.  We’re doing more feature stories, more off stories on the news.  We would do, for example, a story about a particular murder--we did a story this year in Seattle about the murder of a Russian bride, and the issue of Russian brides coming to the United States.  Marrying American men is a very rich and interesting subject, and one guy had met somebody over the Internet, went over to Russia, romanced her, brought her back here, ultimately ended up killing her or rather hired a hit man to kill her.  It was a story that was rich in high eight video that he shot of the situation, and it made a wonderful, wonderful magazine program.  Where the state of the business is as relates to you guys is this, which is the networks have an extraordinary interesting in high eight, reality TV video.  There’s a great story of a friend of mine who was promoted to head reality TV for ABC and everybody said, “Oh, that’s horrible, what a dead-end job that is,” but who would know that in a couple of years that essentially it would be where TV is.  What people are most interested in is seeing something real unfold.  We set up cameras in a van this year where it was two twins who were adopted by their adopted mother, and she said, “Everyone says I’m a horrible parent, why don’t you put cameras into our trailer and you can see what a wonderful mother I am?”  So we put cameras in for a year.  We changed tapes every so often.  She was actually in charge of the on and off switch, and what we had was an extraordinary portrait of an American family gone crazy.  She would be screaming at the kids and the stepfather would come in and beat the kids up, and these kids were really wonderful kids, and you just felt horrible about it.  End result was we did the story, we aired the story, she ended up losing custody of her children, rightly, and they ended up getting re-adopted.  What you can do as future journalists and photographers is really figure out the best way and best uses of high eight DVD cameras.  One of my other jobs is to do webcasts for ABC.  What that is, is what we try to do is try to do broadband programming on the web, and if anyone’s interested, it’s on ABCNEWS.com under “webcasts.”  Some of the webcasts we’ve created have been on some pretty far-out subjects such as UFOs, Internet pornography, we’ve done Internet privacy, we did mafia hit men, and the trick of doing webcasts versus conventional programming for television is that when you do a webcast you want people to click off.  What you try to do when you do a webcast is you try to do something where people’s attention spans will wander, and you want them to wander, so that as the webcasts--does everyone know what I’m talking about when I say webcasts?  Okay.  We did a story on UFOs, and what we did was three interviews with three different experts on the UFO phenomenon.  One was a person who believes it, one was a person who doesn’t believe it, and one was a person who shows you how easy it is to fake UFO video.  So as the video was being streamed on the web, and you as a computer-interacter are watching this program, we’re also giving you little flashes, we’re telling you that if you’re interested in a poll about UFOs, click here.  Then you click off there.  Then you have something where as the video is going on, we have “If you’re interested in the history of UFOs, click here,” “If you’re interested in documents on UFOs, click here,” as the program is going.  The idea is that every time a person, if you will, takes another path to the top of the mountain, you throw another ad at them.  You also keep them on target, you keep them on the site longer.  What we found on that is that most people, when they hit a website, is on for less than a minute, so if you could entice a computer user to stay on the site longer, obviously you get more ads you can run at them, you get more information that they’ll absorb, and you’ll keep them interested in the site.  It’s exactly the opposite of television.  Television will say, “okay, we’ll give you an hour on Seattle murders, and here’s the hour, and we know you’ll probably click off during commercials, but we’re giving you an hour on one subject.”  What we do on the web is, we know you’ll be clicking off and we want you to click off, but we want you to click off within our site.  It’s interesting that the web was the rage a few years ago, and obviously, with the fall of the Internet, it’s fallen out of favor, but it will come back, and I already see signs of it coming back.  If you look at the web from a business point of view, the number one thing that drives the web is prostitution and sex.  Sex sites and prostitution compose something like 28 billion dollars of what the web is about.  The second is gambling.  That’s the second one.  Third, far behind, is commerce--people buying and selling products.  And if you look at the way—and I’m not saying that everybody should go off now and start looking at all the porn sites--but the porn sites actually have the highest advances in technology that currently exist on the web.  And look at the way they’re using cameras, and the way they’re functioning, because that has great applications to the way it could be used later on in newsgathering.  They have webcams in people’s homes--70, 80, 90 homes at one time. Everybody becomes a broadcaster today.  Everybody can become a broadcaster today.  Think about the applications that would be for a community.  Let’s say you’re on the road and you’re in Paris and you want to see what’s going on in Brooklyn or Queens.  You have individuals who can give you reports about what’s going on in those areas.  You can see what’s going on in a street fair that’s happening in your community.  Or maybe you’re not out of town, you’re just too lazy to get out of your house and you want to be able to see it.  You will have all these applications that will be there.  The way that you make the money is that you have networks that will be created that will cater to all those webcasts that are going one, and the technology is not that far away from where you can do it.  We did an experiment on web recently where what we tried to was create cameras inside locations within New York.  So what you’d do is have a program and then you’d have people come to those webcams around New York and be able to communicate with the host.  So instead of expensive cameras being lugged to locations, you have webcams where they can go to which is really on top of a person’s computer, and they can interact with the host at a television show.  That’s going to be the future.  The future is really going to be a decentralization of the networks and the major medias, to much smaller groupings.  So if it’s NBC News or the New York Times or whatever, those institutions will still exist, but I think what you’ll find is that those institutions will create mini-institutions under their umbrella where they will be creating programming that services a very, very much larger, wider branch of the population, much more geared towards the specialized taste of individuals, whether it’s what’s going on in your local community, what’s going on within a business situation.  If you think of the way that Bloomberg television was created, Bloomberg television, if you study the Bloomberg machine which is an absolutely brilliant creation, and I got a chance last week to play with it last week with some of the architects of it, it provides you with an extraordinary range of information.  You say to yourself, well, how do they make money?  Well they charge $1,500 a month to rent it, and they have over 150,000 subscribers, so you do the math.  What’s going to happen is you’ll have webcams and webcasts that are going to be created where it’s going to be in communities around the country where you’ll subscribe for $10 a month, will have 100,000 or 150,000 subscribers, that people within ABC news will be contributing to the web things.  Frankly what we’ll be doing is we’ll have people within communities who will be volunteering to do their own broadcasts from their computer.  They’ll be downloading their video that they shot.  Here’s the Puerto Rican Day parade shot yesterday.  If you want to see post-game interviews with New Jersey net players, there it is.  And there will be a wide, wide ranging menu, where you’ll be creating your own news experience.  That day is not far.  It slowed down, it was actually fast-tracked a couple of years ago, but then when the Internet bust happened it came to a grinding halt.  But already there was major talk of funding that was going to go on in the creation of that sort of thing.  I’ve been yacking long enough.  Let me open it up for questions.

Younger:  I have a question for you.  How do you choose what goes on Primetime Live?  Who chooses it? 

Rosen:  I wanted to talk a little about the web thing, but that’s not normally what I think most people hear about.  The way we choose programs on Primetime is we usually have a story meeting that goes on in the morning, where a story editor presents to us some of the stories from around the country that we think will be germane, and again, what we’re more interested in is more the feature stories.  Certainly, if there’s a hard news breaking story that we think we could differentiate ourselves, again, we’re a once a week program, so we’re on Thursday night and 20/20 is on Friday night, so we really can’t bring anything special to the table until much later in the week, so what we try to do is look at what angle we can take on it that will hold until Thursday or Friday.  Oftentimes it’s a booking, it’s a get that we try to find a particular angle on a story, an interview on the story, that we could do.  So we usually send out, sometimes if it’s a big breaking story, certainly the time of the school shootings we did those.  We’d send out producers and bookers to locations to see what special interviews that are exclusive we could get at that time.  A lot of people talk about the “feeding frenzy” surrounding some of that.  Well, you know what?  It is a kind of feeding frenzy that exists around those big stories that happen.  I think that 9/11 certainly changed all that, because I think prior to 9/11 there was, to be honest with you, a lack of news that was out there.  Some of the stories that maybe didn’t register high on the radar screen registered pretty high on the radar screen and added great significance.  But since 9/11 I think it’s really gotten all the journalists, certainly within ABC News, back on their game--to covering really the major and most significant stories of our time.  And not to say that school shootings is an insignificant story, it’s a very important story, but I think sometimes we tended to give it a little more attention than it rightly deserved.  But we usually do is we have a story meeting in the morning and we make some of those decisions, and then from there we have a story meeting later in the afternoon where we go over what all the producers are working on, and sometimes stories bore us after a week or two after we’ve assigned them, and we take the assignment back and tell the producer to stand down.  When you shoot for television it’s a lot of money at stake, and sometimes these stories can run upwards of $50, 75, 100 thousand in budgets before you go out to shoot them, so you really want to make sure that you’re not throwing away money, and that you’re right on with some of the decisions.  Any questions?

Audience:  About the webcasts and the idea of people giving reports from their webcams and their computers and then streaming their own video.  I’m wondering how you then control the material, not in the sense of censorship, but like if somebody had a twisted sense of humor, for instance. . .

Rosen:  That’s a very good question.  That’s why, and again I’m not trying to--there are no controls in the world of porn, they just throw anything on there.  Within institutional settings there will be controls because you will be creating the network and you’ll be monitoring what you put out there, so your editors inside the world web will review anything before loading it into it, so if you’re worried about like if you want to make sure that the site is clean for your children and clean for yourself, frankly, you’ll work within the framework of ABC or New York Times, as opposed to some, you know, there were some webcasts started which were absolutely horrible in taste, but these were completely off the charts, so you obviously know what you’re getting if you click onto one of those.  Just like you would know if you buy the New York Times what you’re getting versus what you get if you buy Hustler magazine.  So if it’s protected within the framework of an institution I think it’ll have some standards.

Audience:  But that doesn’t sound like everybody is a broadcaster, it sounds like everybody is a freelancer.

Rosen:  I think the word freelancer is--I was a freelancer and I needed to make money in order to survive and I’d try to sell to as many different magazines and outlets.  This will not be a profit-making venture by freelancers.  This will be more like letters to the editor of people.  That will be the framework of it.  It’ll be more like, “I want to get something off my chest, I really want you to see my video,” and all of that.  In meetings with lawyers there will be a lot of disclaimers, how do you know a certain video is not created or staged?  Well you don’t know.  If you look at some UFO sites, for example, here’s the latest UFO videos from New Mexico.  Now do you really believe that’s a UFO over New Mexico or was it some kid who may have created it?  Well you kind of know what you’re getting in some of those types of pictures.  I don’t think, initially, at least for the first 5 years, that there will be a lot of profit in it for the freelancers.  I think the profit will be with the corporations who create the umbrellas to sell the ads and then do that.  That’s where I see it heading, at least for the short time.

Audience:  You mentioned the shift after 9/11 towards maybe a greater treatment of the “most important stories of the day,” and to me, a statement like that assumes that there’s a consensus behind that statement, and I’m wondering, how do you manufacture that consensus?  Where does that consensus come from, who’s making that consensus?

Rosen:  I think it’s all of us getting together in a room and talking about stories that impact our lives in the greatest way, and I think that is the thing that probably overweighs most decision-making which is what is the story or stories that impact our lives in the biggest way.  Safety in school is a big issue so that’s why we tended to cover school shootings quite a bit.  It also was a new phenomenon which is kids walking in with guns to schools and shooting up their classroom, that was a real special phenomenon that had a high interest.  We don’t have all the answers, boy, if we did, ABC would be in first place, but I think what we try to do is crystallize our decision-making, and what we try to balance it with is we certainly know that if you have the proverbial naked man running across the stage you will get an audience, but you’ll get an audience for a short time, but you’ll end up losing the audience for the long term ‘cause you’ll blow your credibility.  So what you try to do is stories that are responsible, important, have a high interest, and will hopefully leave the viewers with something more than they started the program with.  The last thing you want is for a viewer to watch a program for 10-12 minutes and say, “that was a complete waste of my time.”  Which often happens.  That’s something that you really try to avoid. 

Audience:  Some of the questions are about story selection and what qualifies for news and what doesn’t, I know you’re a magazine show, but I think that as a TV journalist myself, one of my concerns is that journalism in general, mainstream journalism, has lost the tether of public service, so that if one of the issues of the day is campaign finance reform or welfare reform, not a sexy story, but arguably a tremendously important story, it seems that we’re moving away from that and we’re moving towards what is a spectacle and what will attract more eyeballs.

Rosen:  Let me ask you something.  Let me stop you right there.  Would you watch a campaign finance reform story? 

Audience:  My challenge as a correspondent, as you well know, is to try to find a compelling character to lead me through the world of campaign finance excess or campaign finance cheapness--try to find some way to say, “this is why we should give a shit about the system as it works right now.”  That’s a tremendous challenge but I don’t even think at many networks, perhaps including my own, that people are really thinking that hard about how we can tell these difficult stories in a visual way, because it’s so easy to go live with the Chandra press conference, it’s so much easier to show that helicopter tumbling down the hill over and over again, or it’s so much easier to do a really sexy visceral magazine story on something that’s sexy and visceral versus trying to do that public service.

Rosen:  At ABC we actually try to do that, and I think we’ve succeeded for the most part.  Brian Ross did something called The Money Trail where he followed politicians around and showed you what their money was and who’s giving, and he ambushed some people at various functions, including our own Michael Eisner.  He did stories about corporate jets and the uses and abuses or it.  So we certainly have attempted it more than any other network, and we may be more successful than any other network at it, but by just saying campaign finance reform itself is a fairly boring subject to most people, but if you do it in a way that gets your outrage going, your blood boiling, I think you could be successful.  I think we’ve tried to do that as much as we can.  I have a big file on my desk, not campaign finance reform, but something called executive pay which interests me a great deal, which is why these people continue to make the gross sums of money that they make when their companies continue to lose money for all their stockholders.

Younger:  Let me just ask you, because I think that the example of Ross Perot coming in and talking about the national deficit and all the things he did, everybody thought this was something that people could never understand, and yet he’ get up there with his pie charts and we got it, and I think people were interested in it, and it became an issue because somebody explained it in a way that hey, it affects your pocket, and health issues in this country.  There’s all these really big issues that we don’t see on TV that really affect our lives.

Audience:  I think the disconnect that the media has with the relevance of these large stories to our daily lives, and they are very relevant, and where I think the medial fails to some extent anyway is bringing it home, exactly as you just described, or as you have with Ross Perot and pie charts.  You can make campaign finance a very compelling story if you connect the dots enough for the viewer to see how it effects your daily pocketbook. 

Rosen:  But you also have to commit to spend that money . . .

 

Audience:  Right, and that’s the hardest thing to get a producer to say, “Hmmm, I’m going to commit the money to do that as opposed to Chandra.”  That’s like out of the park, you know?

Rosen:  But I think we’ve done that with Brian’s work, and you really have to find the right vehicle, the angle, to do those types of stories.  You can’t just get a producer to say, “Here’s campaign finance reform, just go do it,” and then lose that person for three to four months.  Frankly, in the world of print there are very few people who would have that license.  Bartlett and Steel, maybe, are the only ones that come to mind, for Time magazine, who would basically just say to their editor, “we’re going to do campaign finance reform, we’ll see you in two years,” Besides them I can’t think of anyone else who would have that license.  Any other questions?  How’s your program doing?

Gefter:  It’s not going to happen, so we’re just here to talk.

Audience:  What about that issue of ads, because you were saying those ads will pop up on the webcast.  One of the reasons that I don’t get a lot of my information from both sides is because I don’t want ads popping up all the time, so I’ll read The Guardian, The Village Voice and all these other sites that don’t . . .

Rosen:  In a million meetings on web, when everybody is sitting there and saying, “Okay, how can we make money, how can we make money?”  I’ll just share with you some finances of it, which is, they had been getting at the height, $35-$50 per 1,000 users and an average site would maybe get, a really successful site, would get a million per month or something, so you do the math on that.  Then what happened was that $35-$50 per thousand, then something like 60 percent of those people who bought the ads defaulted on the payments, they went out of business, they went bankrupt, they didn’t pay their bills.  So if you want to know why the whole dot-com thing collapses is really because the ad rates were based on very small numbers, and even those small numbers were not met by any checks that came their way.  So before giving a program you’d have to get sponsors for a program.  It’s a very, very difficult economic model right now to figure out, and a lot of people have not figured it out successfully.  I think it’ll come, I think once when everyone has DSL lines and when everyone has high-speed modems connected it’ll be much more fun to use.  It’s not fun right now to use, it’s too cumbersome.  But I’ve heard various estimates.  I think realistically it’s at least three years away.

Audience:  You mentioned before about the aspiring young videographers, documentarians, photographers, grabbing their Sony PD150s or their whatever, but what advise. . .

Rosen:  I’ll tell you what, there was a terrific ABC journalist named Eddie Pentgram who was at a party and he saw a schoolteacher from the public school in Harlem and he tried to pick her up for a date.  She didn’t want to.  So he instead said, “can I follow you for the course of the season in school, in the course of the school year.”

Audience:  He became a stalker!

Rosen:  He didn’t become a stalker, but he became an amazing video journalist, and he documented her ups and downs through the course of the school year in this public school.  And it was five nights on Nightline, I was one of the judges of it, and he ended up winning the Livingston Award last year for journalists 35 and under.  $10,00 check.  And he just basically was inspired enough to see a great subject that he decided to stay with, and he brought it to Nightline which is a good place to bring it to, and they ended up airing five nights of it.  The advice I have for you is to keep your eyes and ears open and look for really rich stories, and the real video will come through, just like they do in the world of print.

Younger:  What about, like a lot of times we see really fabulous documents that students have done, who’ve really done their research, they’ve interviewed people, they have a lot of documentary work with it, whether it’s video or photographs like this toxic tour of Texas that somebody did that was really fabulous.  It was done in Texas, and she just did it on Xeroxes and had them bound and they changed all the laws in Texas because of it.  Where could someone pitch a story like that?  How would we get it to you if somebody had a really great one?

Rosen:  Just send it to us.  Believe it or not we read our emails, my email is roseni@abc.com, it’s an easy email to remember, send me emails.  I get emails all the time from journalists around the country, I try to respond within a timely manner to most people unless they’re complete nuts.  Believe it or not, people think we’re not accessible. They’re accessible at the New York Times.  A lot of newspapers, believe it or not, now are printing the email to reporters so you can email a reporter directly now.  The Times haven’t done that yet, but . . .

Gefter:  Yeah, we have.

Rosen:  Oh have you?  So if you want, you can read a story and then email the reporter with comments or with information.  Anything else?

Younger:  Anything you want to ad Phil?

Gefter:  I was going to talk for a couple of minutes more.

Rosen:  I’m going to turn it over, so it’s all yours.  It was great to meet you. 

(Applause)

Gefter:  What I was going to show you is several pages of the New York Times, the front page, and I was going to show you the pre-edit, the pictures that I showed at the page one meeting from which we then arrived at these pictures.  It’s not that this doesn’t have any meeting, but you would come to see at least what the process was, at least what my edit was before these landed on the page.  I’ll just tell you briefly about this picture on top.  Our staff photographer, Steve Crowley, went with Bush on his European tour and to Russia to sign this nuclear arms cut treaty.  There were lots of pictures, the Wires went as well, and there were hundreds of pictures daily of Bush in Germany, with Schroeder and Bush with Putin, but Steve, there was something about this one picture.  When the story was filed that day, he talked about how Putin and Bush were just emulating each other left and right.  And when I saw this picture, I thought, “This is it!  This is it exactly.”  When I presented it in the page one meeting, I said, “Here they are, Bush and Putin, in perfect lock step,” and if you look at it, yeah, it’s really pretty amazing.  This was the first picture I showed in my slide show, and usually that signals to the editors that that’s the picture I think is the best.  I would say that 30 percent of the time it lands on the front page.  So 30 percent of time my judgment is corroborated, which is still pretty good odds I think.  There were a bunch of things I shared that day, most of them were of this, but then there were half a dozen other things that occurred around the world, and also we had shot, it was the first day of Memorial Day weekend, and we had three photographers out locally looking for people leaving or preparing to go or being a way to have a stand alone picture that marked Memorial Day weekend, and there were pretty good pictures, but this picture really struck me.  It was not a story, it’s sort of hard to see it, I’ll read the caption.  “A corridor of police was deployed at Incheon Airport yesterday for the arrival of the American World Cup squad in Seoul.”  I thought this was particularly striking.  It’s a post September 11 photograph if ever there were one.  If you see this line of policemen waiting for the U.S. team to arrive, and everyone agreed that that was really kind of something.  It’s not a brilliant picture, but it’s pretty good, so that ended up on the page.  I wanted to show you some of the other things that I had shown that day just to give you a sense of what we chose from.  Then there’s this, it’s very rare that run a five-column picture on the top of page one, and it’s unfortunate that this picture was here as well, because I think it takes away, at least in terms of the layout of the page, it’s just unfortunate.  We had seven photographers there that day, and I don’t know if you know what this, you can read it, “Where Twin Towers stood, a silent goodbye.” This is the final column of the World Trade Center being carted off, the very end of the clean up ground zero, and recovery.  It was a huge media event, obviously, and we had seven photographers, and someone asked before about objectivity.  Seven different photographers presented seven completely different views of this.  But all of it was the same ceremony, it was just different takes on the same subject.  We arrived at this just because it was striking and it was pretty much the overview and that’s pretty much what we tend to look for often enough is the overview, at least on the front page.  Then there’s this.  This is kind of funny.  Not funny, funny.  Same day.  Same pictures, just reversed.  One of them is for the national edition, and one is for the New York edition.  This was the national edition because the overview, this is Putin arriving at a NATO summit and these are NATO flags, and NATO was originally created in protection of the NATO countries from Russia, and here is the Russian prime minister arriving to joint NATO.  It is a pretty metaphoric image, and the bottom one was the removal of the final column two days before this other one, and in New York that was the more important image, so that’s why we did that.  We just reversed them.  This isn’t as interesting as it would have been if I’d shown you the slide show.  But, alas.  I have about seven minutes if anyone has any questions.

Audience:  Do you get mail from people sending in comments about the photographs?  In either the positive or negative?  What are some of the responses?

Gefter:  Sure.  Sometimes positive and sometimes really negative and bitter and angry.  Let’s see, it’s such a blur to me because we receive so many.  Is there a more specific question about it?  Do you have another?

Audience:  I guess because I’m very skeptical about images I see most of the time, and I just don’t feel that--I guess it never occurred to me to respond to a newspaper regarding a photograph unless it’s really offensive.  I’m wondering if there’s an instance where you have an image on the front page and it divides opinion.

Gefter:  Right. There have been pictures from the Middle East, in fact, where one was a rather bloody image and people were horrified that we chose to run it.  But actually, the one that got a great many responses was we ran, on the nation challenge, do you remember that section of the paper?  We created this section post September 11 to run coverage of both September 11 events and the war in Afghanistan, and we ran a triptych on the cover of the front page of the nation challenge of an execution, a kind of roadside execution.  I don’t know if you remember that.  It didn’t win a Pulitzer, but it won something major, but it was three pictures: this horrible picture of this Taliban member found on the side of the road, dragged, interrogated and then shot.  His pants were down around his ankles and he was on the ground, do you remember that?  And we thought very long and hard about running that, and what we did was we actually cropped it.  (End of tape)

So we thought very carefully about that, and our concern was that we don’t show his genitalia, and everyone else was so freaked out and angry about our showing an execution, but at what point do you not report what is really happening?  I think that was our conclusion, that this is what was happening in Afghanistan and we felt compelled-- these pictures were worth much more than a thousand words in this case, and we decided to run it. 

Audience:  I’ll respond quickly to that, I remember thinking, because I think someone else mentioned this possibility, that it was cropped because he was castrated.  He was covered with blood and there was just this assumption that there was something being hidden there.  So I was just shocked by the implications also.  I was going to ask you about, this is not to target you, but I honestly feel like the New York Times slogan is kind of authoritarian, and I wonder how you feel about that.  “All The News That’s Fit To Print.”  And I think there’s a real problem with that and yet you’re sticking by it, like there’s no questioning it. 

Gefter:  Listen, I can’t answer that question.  That’s . .

Audience:  I’m not targeting you. . .

Gefter:  No,  no, no, but it is an institutional slogan that’s been part of the newspaper for years and years and years, and I can tell you what I think of it, but it’s not really relevant what I think of it.  There are some people that say it’s not all the news that’s fit to print, it’s all the news that fits.  That’s kind of a joke that we have within the Times.  So you tell me.  I don’t know.  It’s a good point, and I don’t dismiss the point, but these decisions were made at a much higher pay scale than my own, and what can I say?

Younger:  Do you feel that you’ve seen censorship about what would go in the paper and what wouldn’t go in the paper?  Because it seem to me that during the World Trade Center thing that we weren’t getting any news that Al-Jazeera was getting or any of the sort of Arab side of things.  And I know that would be a really inflammatory thing, but at point I really wanted to know what they were saying about us and what was going on.  I wanted to hear the other side.

Gefter:  We did run stories about what Al-Jazeera was reporting at times, or in fact, when there was the first videotape of Osama Bin Laden that Al-Jazeera ran, we ran it saying that it was run on Al-Jazeera.  There were caveats, and we acknowledged the caveats.  We weren’t saying, “This is true,” we were saying, “This is what Al-Jazeera reports,” so the reader can make his or her own determination about how accurate it was.  Censorship, you know, I don’t know how to answer that question to be perfectly honest.  I don’t experience censorship in meetings at the New York Times.  We don’t say, “Oh, we’re not going to run that, we don’t want the world to know.”  We don’t do that.  That’s not what the New York Times is about.  We might try to find a way to report something, or we might wait a day, there might be rumors of something happening, and every other media organization in the world will cover something, and we’re not certain that it’s not true, and we might wait a day before we report it just because we want to be as accurate and correct as we can be.  I don’t see that as censorship, I see that as circumspection, let’s say.  I know that seems like the party line, but what can I say?

Younger:  I’m glad to hear it from someone who works there.  And somebody that has some integrity. 

Gefter:  Here’s an example of something recently.  The World Cup was going on last week for soccer, and I thought that here’s this event, and I’m not even interested in sports, but soccer is a game that’s played around the world and people are really interested in it and it’s a big deal and I showed a number of pictures on the first day, thinking that we should do something on page one, and nobody was particularly interested, because nobody is particularly interested in soccer around that table.  That’s a minor thing, and it’s fairly benign, but it’s not censorship.  It’s more . . .

Audience:  . . who’s at the table.

Gefter:  Yeah.  Basically.  Is that a flaw?  I don’t know.  I can’t say yes or no, all I can say is I’ve been in the world long enough to know that there are a lot of dialogues going on in the world and the people involved change the nature of the dialogue, and the New York Times is known for a certain level of dialogue, that’s kind of why people read it.  I don’t know, you tell me, if that’s bad or good or it just is the way things are.  That’s kind of what I mean about the nature of objectivity.  Well, you know, can you be perfectly objective?  No. It’s not possible.  But can you reach for it or aspire to it?  That’s all we can do, and that’s what we try to do.  For better or worse, as I said. 

Audience:  Would you feel that advertising and advertisers play a great role in what goes into the Times?

Gefter:  Absolutely not.  Absolutely not.  There’s a great, brilliant, wonderful divide which we call the division between the church and state, at the New York Times, and never the two shall meet.  There is a promotion, a marketing department, and you have probably seen ads for kinds of events that the New York Times sponsors or events like this Times Talks events, where we moderate panels on different subjects, for example.  That’s more marketing, but that’s also separate from anything advertising-driven that affects the New York Times.  We will go after, like our business section will go after companies that advertise frequently in the New York Times, and sometimes we sacrifice their ad money, but that’s the line that has to be maintained between church and state, for us to be able to report honestly, accurately, and you know. . .

Audience:  It is a little bit hard to believe for me, because even public TV stations are more funded by the viewer, but these days many of the corporation funds, like the Mobil Theatres, ABC, CBS, and NBC, but they be ordered by the owner company, like GE or Disney.  I just wonder how it’s really possible reality-wise how the New York Times can be. . .

Gefter:  Well one reason is that the New York Times is owned by its own company.  It is the New York Times Company.  The publisher and chairman of the company is also, like, he studied journalism.  I don’t know.  It’s a good question.  I understand that your dubious about this, it’s legitimate to be, since every major news organization is owned by a conglomerate, it’s a legitimate question.  Anyway, I have to go because my car’s going to be towed.

(Applause)

 

Gefter and Rosen Analysis

by Ron Witherspoon

The presentation delivered by Philip Gefter, a page one editor for the New York Times, was a review of the process that editors adhere to when selecting the front-page image.

Beginning at a noontime meeting each day, all the editors and department desk heads discuss what is potentially “front page-able” for each news section.  From this meeting Gefter learns what can be considered material for front-page images.  Reviewing over 1,000 images daily from 30 or more Times staff photographers, as well as freelancers from Reuters and AP wire services, Gefter assembles approximately 20 images for the final selection and for the second meeting of the day at 4:30.

People think there is a strategy or agenda to news presentation, but Gefter finds this to be laughable.  He said over the years he has learned to be as objective as possible when it comes to his front-page selections.  According to Gefter the large chorus of editors results in subjectivity.  The subtle shift from flash in your face photography to that of a narrative style, which parallels and is independent from the story, is what the editors have developed at the New York Times.

While pictures are visceral and words are cerebral Gefter said that he could see the visceral immediately.  Yet, according to Gefter, objectivity is a problem for the readers even when the editors find a visual read that, not only illustrates the story, but also creates a parallel narrative stylism.  The editors at the Times rely on the accuracy of the copy editors for photo cut-lines, or as he refers to them, the editorial surgeons.

What is it about a picture that makes the photo editor say “yes” to a certain image?  Of the thousands of pictures that Philip Gefter reviews each day, how does he and the other editors choose what is “fit to print”?

Objectivity is a problem with any interpreted image projected in media because we inherently bring biases to the table.  When asked if he was censored in any way he retorted, “No!” and went on to say advertisers have nothing to do with any decision-making.  “The New York Times is owned by The New York Times,” there is no Big Brother watching over them, Gefter said.

For the most part, readers are given a context in which to frame projected images but he went on to say that the editors don’t ever reach pure truth. He said that through the selection process, which is coupled with a demand for accuracy and a high level of integrity, the reader is able to come to a consensus of the visual truth.  However, how can we as readers of the cerebral and visceral, read an image without biases coming from the editors and even from the readers, if the best the editors can do is just reach some type of general, collective wisdom?  Can there be a real truth in the photographic images that are projected in the Times coming from those sitting at the table?