Globe public editor: When photo captions go wrong

By Sylvia Stead, public editor of The Globe and Mail

Great photo captions are like poetry, or a funny tweet. They grab your attention with few words, make you think and with luck do it with humour or insight.

By Sylvia Stead, public editor of The Globe and Mail

Great photo captions are like poetry, or a funny tweet. They grab your attention with few words, make you think and with luck do it with humour or insight.

I’ve written before about the importance and impact of a great headline. I pointed to a survey of reading habits called the EyeTrack study by the U.S. Poynter Institute, which found (by tracking where the eyes go on a page) that readers love photos in newspapers. Their eyes “followed a common pattern of navigation. The majority of readers entered all pages through the dominant photo or illustration, then travelled to the dominant headline, then to teasers and cutlines, and finally to the text.”

And if you read a great caption first, you are drawn to the article. Rather than good examples, there have been two complaints in the past week about Globe and Mail cutlines that have failed for different reasons.

Related content on J-Source:

The front page of the Report on Business on Wednesday featured a photo of a mature conventional oil field in California. The article was about unconventional production booms and the political pressure for the U.S. to end the country’s ban on crude oil exports.

The cutline to the photo said: “Shale oil production is a major factor in forecasts that the United States will become the world’s largest oil producer by next year.”

This is true and factual, but it is misleading to introduce that fact with a photo that shows quite a different oil production than shale.

A Calgary reader said “contrary to the caption, the photo used to illustrate this article is not of ‘shale oil production’, but a picture of the Chevron Kern River field and heavy oil facility near Bakersfield, Calif. This image bears absolutely no resemblance to what a shale oil field looks like. Modern production practices use multiple well pads that minimize the number of wells and dramatically reduce the need for production flow lines. I am dismayed that you would use what amounts to an inflammatory picture to illustrate this article. It is no wonder that people are so upset about the development of shale oil and gas fields if they are led to believe that this is what will be built in their backyards.”

While the headline talked about “the oil boom” and the many wells in the photo suggested a “boom”, a reader would of course expect that given the caption information, that this was a photo of shale oil production, which it is not.

I would think a more accurate photo and/or better caption information could have been found.

Another reader said that photo captions should explain what is going on in the photo, and I agree. “I have recently noticed noticed a tendency in the Globe where a photograph is captioned by by a general summary of the story; in effect another headline or sub heading rather than a factual caption,” the reader writes. “Someone at the Globe seems to consider a news photograph to be a pretty blob of colour to decorate the page."

To continue reading this column, please go theglobeandmail.com where it was originally published.

Related content on J-Source: