A PR Picture From A Police Line-Up

A hundred years ago a newspaper front page was a horrible mash of text and competing headlines, with one cheap ad and maybe a map that looked like it was drawn by an eight-year old.

Lately they are things of, dare I say, beauty. A huge amount of thought and effort went into making them easy on the eye.

Pictures are a big part of this. Yet the budget for picture editors has been slashed, in many cases to zero.

We are reliant on cunning designers, freelancers, photo agencies, and yes the PR world.

Still most of we get offered by way of pix from flaks is inadequate, bordering on actually insulting to the client.

This is typical: the other day I sought a nice pix of a famous business person who works in a creative field. What I got was two black and whites, one of which might have been a passport photo. The other looked like it was from a police line-up.

“That’s all we’ve got,” came the flak reply. Hm. Why?

The funny thing here is that the hacks are trying harder than the flaks to make the client look good. I’ll keep the pic of him from the police line-up in my back pocket for when he does get arrested.

Otherwise, I want an arty, not too arty, shot that can hold a page.

The biz pages of The Times and The Telegraph look really good and that’s a lot due to the pix.

The FT still has way too many that are of boring/important white men in suits, but even it is trying harder.

The news pages of The Times not infrequently have a pic of a big animal somewhere in the world doing something extraordinary. There is no news in the photo, other than that it is a new shot.

A suggestion: compare the pix in the papers to the ones you send out for your clients.

Ours are better, right?