The seductiveness of the image

Have been thinking about this a lot lately, and after last night's post have decided the picture is seductive. Not talking about readers here, but reporters. It's easy to get into the mindset of snap, get just enough for the caption, move on, snap, get just enough, etc.

And so the reporter goes into a "caption" mindset, not a reporting mindset. The result:
a lot of "Oh, I didn't ask that" responses.

But what we have to understand is that while these may look like captions, they really are mini-essays, and we should report as such.

This shouldn't be all that new. Even in print, if we consider how many people now use our papers these days, it's to scan -- scan the headline, scan the photo, scan the cutline, maybe scan the read-in or drop head. These become assembled as little news essays. They may never read the story.

This week continues the experiment in moblogs as a form of journalism, and that's one of the learning moments.