[justin66]

The wide use of the photo over the years is proof enough that it's a great photo. People love it. With all due respect to the copy editing topic of the linked column, people don't care in the slightest about journalistic rule lawyering regarding the criteria that should be used for selecting photographs for a news article. They care about accuracy, which evidently isn't the same thing.

If there are any worries about misunderstanding, make sure the photo's caption is clear. To someone who isn't part of the Church of Photojournalism, it honestly seems very simple.

If you are concerned with "depicting Neil Armstrong" above all else you're not going to want a photo with his visor down in any case. But that makes excluding this photo seem every bit as stubborn as excluding a photo of a Saturn V rocket or something.

[potatolicious]

Thanks for trivializing an entire profession, and the healthy helping of weasel words - I was running low.

"Church of Photojournalism", "journalistic rule lawyering"?

Has it ever occurred to you that the journalistic standards surrounding photo manipulation may have actually been arrived at after a century of experience, rather than a bunch of tightasses obsessing over haughty principles, as you've so conveniently insinuated?

This is something that bothers me about HN regularly - we have such a strong tendency here to trivialize other people's jobs, to the point where anything that isn't immediate obvious to the layman must be idiocy of some sort.

> "To someone who isn't part of the Church of Photojournalism, it honestly seems very simple."

So the fact that tens of thousands of photojournalists over the course of an entire century have arrived at, and agreed upon, this set of rules for reportage means nothing. Clearly you, a lay person who has never been deeply exposed to photojournalism, you know better. It seems simple.

[justin66]

> Has it ever occurred to you that the journalistic standards surrounding photo manipulation may have actually been arrived at after a century of experience, rather than a bunch of tightasses obsessing over haughty principles, as you've so conveniently insinuated?

I think the standard rules of photojournalism are ordinarily probably very useful. If the comments of the guy I initially replied to are truly representative of the field (you haven't given any opinion here), it's IMO clearly not perfect.

> So the fact that tens of thousands of photojournalists over the course of an entire century have arrived at, and agreed upon, this set of rules for reportage means nothing.

Is there truly a consensus position on something this specific? Such that it would categorically be a mistake under the rules to use a (very good) photograph of Buzz Aldrin walking on the moon when the subject of the article is Neil Armstrong? In spite of the fact that walking on the moon is what Neil Armstrong is known for, and there are no proper pictures of him doing it, and a pic of Aldrin taken by Armstrong is the closest we're going to get?

I'm skeptical that the field's century of experience leads to such a clear and unambiguous conclusion.

[michaelt]

Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa is a great portrait but I wouldn't use it to illustrate Neil Armstrong's obituary because it's not Neil Armstrong.

[justin66]

The more relevant question is whether you'd be willing to use an image of it in an article about Leonardo?

[michaelt]

For an obituary for Leonardo I'd use a portrait of Leonardo.

I'll add a bit more nuance to that - people don't always read every word of a newspaper article. That's fine, it's why the inverted pyramid [0] model is used. If there's a big headline (Neil Armstrong Dies) and a single photo (the one of Buzz Aldrin) and the fact it's not a photo of Armstrong is in a little caption, it's going to contribute to the misconception that the photo of Aldrin is actually a photo of Armstrong.

Contributing to misconceptions is bad and should be avoided. Luckily this is easy - just use the photo of Armstrong in the lunar lander.

On the other hand, it's unlikely anyone would mistake Leonardo and the woman in the Mona Lisa so it wouldn't seem so bad to me!

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid

[justin66]

I confess that I'm puzzled by what seems to be an assumption that there's only going to be a single photo used in an obituary of one of the world's most historic figures. I agree that if I can only have a single photo in an obit, it should be a picture of the subject of the obit! I also think using a picture where one cannot see the subject's face would be tacky, regardless of who is behind the visor.

I might have some bias here as someone who reads primarily online media, but I haven't observed most venues limiting themselves to a single photo.

[michaelt]

Different news websites and publications have different styles - Sites like [0-5] seem to have decided on having one leading photo, with optional click-through galleries. On the other hand [6-8] have multiple images. Perhaps the websites of print publications have a tradition of more-text-fewer-pictures.

[0] http://science.time.com/2012/08/25/remembering-neil-armstron... [1] http://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/neil-armstrong-modest-h... [2] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/9501410/Neil-Armstr... [3] http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/aug/26/neil-armstrong... [4] http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-08-26/us/33... [5] http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/1247118--neil-arms... [6] http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/neil-a... [7] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11162858 [8] http://www.bangkokpost.com/learning/learning-from-news/30958...

[justin66]

Interestingly, the BBC's obit had multiple videos (represented by a picture with an icon over it, as is the convention) but no still photos. I am obviously not an expert on this :) but I thought their article looked great.