Hi everyone!
It’s been an eventful week, both at NYU and across the city. I hope you’ve all been staying safe — and keeping up with the news.
Here are our top stories from the past week.
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The intruder was seen roaming Rubin Hall. (Image courtesy of Nicola Verani)
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A rodent was seen roaming around the floors of the Palladium dining hall. (Image courtesy of Andres Piccinoni)
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Jane Schoenbrun, third from left, was interviewed about their film “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” by film critic Michael Koresky, center, at the 20th Fusion Film Festival. The festival is led by Tisch professor Susan Sandler, third from right. (Photo by Pat Martin)
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False information peddled by right-wing media outlets has baselessly blamed homeless people for crimes they are not guilty of. (Photo by Kiran Komanduri)
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Opinions and perspectives
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Frank James being escorted by police. (Staff Photo by Manasa Gudavalli)
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The image you see above is of Frank James, the suspect arrested in connection with Tuesday’s subway shooting. It’s not from a wire service, a stock library like Getty Images, or the public domain. It’s an original WSN staff photo taken by Multimedia Editor Manasa Gudavalli.
“The photo in the thumbnail is the first thing readers see, whether that be through the newsletter they get every morning, our social media posts, or our website,” Manasa pointed out. “Every single piece of writing we publish has some form of visual media attached to it — that’s the multimedia team’s rule No. 1.”
This week, I want to highlight the efforts of our multimedia team. I also want to explain where we get our photos, because it’s taken a lot of work to get to where we are multimedia-wise.
These days, the photos and illustrations that WSN publishes are either created for that article, drawn from our internal library, or provided to us by a subject of the article (like an interviewee or a public-relations agent for a film or musician). On rare occasions, we do need to use images from outside sources — but it wasn’t always a rare occasion.
Alexandra Chan, last semester’s managing editor, was WSN’s multimedia editor before Manasa. Along with the editor-in-chief and managing editor at the time, she was one of the staffers responsible for WSN’s shift to original multimedia. Before then, it was fairly common for staff to be figuring out multimedia at the last minute, often pulling public-domain photos because we didn’t have anything on hand.
“With the incredible talent and skill we have at this school, I knew we could take the time and do better,” Alexandra told me.
Doing multimedia in-house helps serve our mission of training the next generation of journalists. With a small but highly skilled team of photographers — and with some coordination and effort — we can just get our own original photos while also providing opportunities for students to do real journalistic work.
Using images from outside sources also invites copyright liability — on a few occasions, WSN used an image without the permission of the creator, and they were rightfully upset at us about it. On the off chance that someone decided to sue, we weren’t prepared to handle the consequences.
When we need to use an outside image these days, we make sure to only draw from sources we have permission to use. This includes images provided by public-relations agents for a film or musician, or, occasionally, public-domain photos of celebrities or buildings.
And there are journalistic benefits to doing things ourselves, too. Here’s what Manasa said about that:
While one of the big perks of having the majority of our multimedia content be original and derived in-house is that we don't run across copyright issues, it also provides our audience with a new perspective. We are showing them content that they haven't seen and that they wouldn't be able to get on other platforms. This is why our readers come to us. If we were using the same photos as every other publication, our readers would assume our content is the same as every other publication.
The quality of the multimedia content that accompanies our articles these days is a credit to the skill of our individual staff — photographers, illustrators, creative directors, photo editors — and to new approaches we’ve taken to coordinating production.
Good multimedia can be one of those things you don’t notice when it’s done well, so I just wanted to point it out this week. By next Saturday, I hope to be able to make a couple exciting announcements about WSN’s future. Until then,
—the editor
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