I had some sympathy for the New Zealand Herald yesterday when it issued an abject apology on behalf of its sister Sunday publication over a mis-identified image. I’ve been there, and experienced the gutting feeling it leaves.
I have even greater sympathy, of course, for the innocent party who was the victim of the mistake. I won’t repeat the nature of the error because that would be rubbing salt into the wound.
I had hoped my own experience with misidentification would still stand as an object lesson, but I suppose 25 years is a long time for anything to stay lodged in collective memory.
However, it is fresh in mine. It happened when the Weekend Herald ran a front page story about a leader of the Headhunters Gang but carried the wrong picture. The image was of a community worker whose only connection with the gang leader was as a community carer for his mother.
I had been mortified, right from the moment I received a Saturday morning phone call that began with the words “um, we have a problem.” As editor, it was my problem even though the error had not been mine. And, yes, it felt a bit like being in mission control when Apollo 13 reported an oxygen tank explosion.
It was a costly mistake, but I like to think some good came out of it. That is because the man who was incorrectly identified was Ricky Houghton. He would go on to earn nationwide praise and recognition as a rangatira and social advocate who ran a not-for-profit housing service that provided homes for hundreds of Northland families.
The qualities recalled by many at the time of his death in 2022 were also evident in how he handled the situation our mistake had placed him in. He was dignified, fair-minded, and accepted our offer of financial compensation. His attitude made an awful situation a little more bearable. Our paths crossed years after the mistake, and he was gracious when he recalled events.
My misidentification experience was not unique. My predecessor carried the can when a caption writer wrongly identified a woman as the Governor-General’s wife. And, in a mistake with chilling parallels to my Headhunter saga, a colleague’s wrong use of a name turned a fine upstanding member of the judiciary into a minor rip-off merchant.
Yesterday’s apology was a stark reminder that the identification of subjects in images requires not only diligence but processes to check for accuracy. It is not only a reminder for the Herald but for all news media. First, like all unintentional errors, there but for the grace of God go they. Secondly, in an era of fragmented processes across a range of media inputs and outputs, mistakes are easier to make and less likely to undergo rigorous multi-level checking in depleted newsrooms. Too much can go wrong.
In the case of the Herald on Sunday there is a third red flag: Templates. Much of its design is templated and stories and images are flowed into pre-set elements on the page. That includes picture captions. The best – or worst – example is on its Party People social page where the subjects of multiple images are identified in a single caption. Two functions were covered last Sunday. In the first set of eight pictures, 21 people were in a single caption. In the second set of eight pictures, 23 people were identified in one caption.
In Sunday’s offending story, there were two decks of photographs, including three portraits in a row. The first portrait was identified in the caption above while the remainder were named in a caption below. This sort of design-led bifurcation is confusing for editorial staff and readers alike.
The design approach is certainly not limited to the Herald on Sunday. Rival Sunday Star Times last weekend carried a number of stories with single combined-image captions that may have looked good to a disconnected page designer, but which challenged the mind and eye of any reader.
In too many publications, tying text to image can be like poring over a Where’s Wally puzzle. The designers seem to have forgotten – or never learned – some of the fundamental principles of page design. British journalist and academic F.W. Hodgson set out the basics almost four decades ago:
- Captions should be adjacent to the picture and preferably under it. A caption that has to be looked for has failed.
- Captions that cover a number of pictures, containing words such as below left, above, far right etc., can exasperate the reader by driving him or her to search around to find which is which – especially if one of the references proves to be wrong.
I have a nasty feeling that captions have become the small victims of page designers whose quest for visual aesthetics transcends reader needs and, at times, common sense. Captions are seen as irritating minor elements. They are seen as a nuisance. That is misguided.
It may also suggest that insufficient attention is paid to them
Cuban-American Mario Garcia is one of the world’s most influential newspaper designers. In his book Pure Design he points out how people read a news page:
“Readers enter a printed page through the largest image on the page, usually a photograph. After this, headlines are seen by the majority of readers. Captions under photographs are the third most frequently visited part of the page.”
Captions, therefore, are important. As Garcia says, “editors with insight realize that these small text blocks represent a powerful tool in the storytelling process”. Yet far too often they do not function that way. Instead, they are perfunctory, often state the obvious, and sometimes fail to give details when the image cries out for explanation.
Years ago, a picture editor at the New Zealand Herald, Don Lochore, recounted the story of a photographer who put almost as much effort into captions as he did to the images he handed in. They had a strong influence on the size and position given to his pictures in the paper. The importance then attached to captions now seems to have been lost.
A rude awakening like the one some Herald executive got last Sunday morning (like the one I received on that Saturday morning a quarter of a century ago) may serve as a wakeup call to pay more attention to captions and to accord them the importance and positioning they deserve.
A few years before he died, Sir Harold Evans was interviewed in a retrospective looking at his seminal book Pictures on a Page:
“[Captions] explain relationships. They fix the time. They may elaborate on what is happening. They can point to an elusive detail. They can attempt to counter our irritating perversity in each drawing different, even contradictory, meanings from the same image. They can confirm mood. And with a single photograph only words can explain how the event occurred or what its effect might be. Photography is limited in its power of analysis”.
Harold Evans believed picture captions were crucial for providing context and understanding. Captions could bridge the gap between the visual and the reader’s comprehension, ensuring that the picture’s meaning was fully conveyed.
That function is enduring but is nowhere as evident in today’s newspapers as it should be. There is an urgent need for changes to how captions are written, where they are placed on the page, and what checks are in place to ensure their accuracy.