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READERS’ REPRESENTATIVE: Scoreboard photo drew eyes — and a question
“Stunning — that’s all I can say,” one caller told me.
“(The scoreboard) is almost enough to make me take a chance on the Royals again this year, but I think my heart is still going to get broken,” said another, obviously unable to resist a dig at the team’s expense.
One caller thought the crystal-clear image was an illustration. “I like seeing what the scoreboard is going to look like,” she said. “But I wish you’d taken a real picture of it, instead of doing this mock-up, or Photoshop or whatever it is.”
Although I can see why she’d mistake it for a computer graphic, there was no manipulation or illustration in the image.
I asked Kansas City Star photographer John Sleezer if he required any special exposures or other camera tricks to obtain such a striking shot. No, he said — that’s exactly what the scoreboard looks like in person.
One Royals fan demonstrated an amazing attention to detail, noticing that text in the test image on the screen incorrectly identified Alex Gordon as a right-handed batter.
My caller’s right; Gordon’s left. But the error belongs to whoever compiled the graphic on the screen. A journalist should never alter an image in a case like this. If editors decided that a mistake in a photo would confuse readers too much, the only ethical option would be either to crop the image, or simply not run it.
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Also on Wednesday, a reader noticed that a story in the Local section about two prostitution arrests in Overland Park quoted a person identified only as “Burris,” speaking about the prostitutes’ activities. The problem: It doesn’t include a first name or other identification of the speaker.
I e-mailed reporter Benita Williams, who confirmed what I’d suspected: The story originally contained the full name of Lenexa police public information officer Sgt. Karl Burris, but the initial reference was inadvertently dropped in the process of rewriting and editing.
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Last Thursday’s Sports section drew lots and lots of calls for something that wasn’t there: the fishing report.
“Please tell me you aren’t cutting that,” said one.
Never fear — this was simply human error. The report ran the next day.
And while I try my best to resist making sweeping generalization about groups, I think I can safely say that fishing fans are among the most wonderfully nice people I can remember speaking to. Hope the crappie are bitin’.