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by wly_cdgr 858 days ago
Question is moot because I would just do my job to the minimum acceptable standard of competence by sourcing a picture of the actual tower
2 comments

How and where would you source it from? The tower is gone, there's likely no public domain images of it, no stock images of it, so where do you get a picture of it?
Somebody else here in the comments found it on Google Maps https://maps.app.goo.gl/Y9QMBDPnazGT1cgj9

I feel like that would be part of the bare minimum of your job for a newspaper.

See, that'd be my job as a photo editor. To know the answer. That's the job. That's what makes it a real job when actually done right. Any high school age intern can find a picture of a random radio tower.

If you can't meet that standard, don't run a photo, or don't run the story. The world won't come to a standstill because a partisan rag from a provincial backwater didn't run a filler item about a wacky heist halfway across the world.

In other words, you don't know how practical or not it is to find a picture of the tower and your opinion on the subject is worthless.
It doesn't matter how practical it is. What matters is, the only honest course of action is to not include a photo of a wrong tower if it's not practical to find a photo of the right one.
So...a picture of some random sky? Maybe draw an outline of what the tower would look like if it were there?
'Artist renditions' are used for space news, criminal descriptions, etc. maybe not such a crazy idea here.
Sure, for high profile things. This is the daily news and a mild curiosity which is hardly worth the resources. Show a picture of a similar model tower, annotate it as such, and I have now have a sense of the difficulty in cutting it down.
That's the thing: you don't. The difficulty of cutting it down is what is the major difference between the real tower and the depicted one.