Some of the most fascinating stuff experienced at The Western Producer by students here for Take-Your-Kid-to-Work day involved things that we never do.
That’s what I’ve been told by colleagues who are the parents of the two students we hosted Nov. 3.
In movies, reporters race around catching murderers, solving crimes and bringing hardened criminals to justice. In reality, a reporter’s life is slightly more mundane. Just slightly, mind.
It involves a lot of time talking on the phone and sitting at a computer, with only the odd bit of racing around.
A WP visit thus doesn’t make for action-packed thrills for visitors to the office. But it does allow time to experiment with computer software and all the nefarious things it can do.
In efforts to educate and entertain our charges-for-a-day, students were shown how to alter photographs for artistic or graphics purposes. They seemed to enjoy erasing the ears from horses and applying pink hair to photos of staff members.
It wasn’t any kind of training for a news career, though. Altering photos is something we never do in editorial and news use. We don’t change people’s features or remove or add things to photos. We want them to show reality. Like newspaper stories, newspaper photos must be true. Readers expect no less.
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Editors were horrified upon discovering the error. Sadly, few readers thought to mention it, which was almost the worst thing about the whole incident.
Even so, the photo wasn’t altered. It was just wrong way up. And such a thing has never happened again, knock wood.
