This column -- and the policy change described herein -- is unlikely to win me many friends. But I feel it's important, and will improve the Pioneer Journal, so any criticism will be worth it.
Starting with this issue, we will no longer publish donation photos. You know what I'm talking about: those pictures of two people, facing the camera, their hands spot-welded to each side of a check. I call them "donation photos" here to be respectful and delicate at this, the time of their funeral. Most readers refer to them as "check-passing photos." In the newspaper business, when no one is around to hear us, we call them something else: "grip-and-grins."
Yes, that staple of rural newspaper publishing, the photo of the local service club president giving a check to a charity, is going away. Instead, we will create a section in our Society section, much like birth announcements, thank yous and Namedroppers, which we will use to announce donations. In text form only, please.
Why are we doing away with something so recognizable? Several reasons:
1. Readers hate them. Every newspaper survey I've laid eyes on says readers don't like them, and don't read them. They wish they were banished from the paper. This would be enough reason, but there's more.
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2. They're ineffective. If readers aren't reading them, why are we publishing them? In fact, I've learned anecdotally from readers that if they see that photo, they won't even read the caption. So they don't ever learn what the donation was about.
3. The coverage is spotty, and often out of scale. Someone once asked me why there was no mention of the $50,000 donation they had recently made in the newspaper, but there was a large photo of a $50 donation. The answer: we knew about the latter because someone called us about it and asked us to take a check-passing photo. The $50,000 donor had a heck of a point. It's like making a big deal about a speeding ticket but failing to cover a murder case. Some people just don't want the attention of a photo, or they're trying to be modest. We hope removing the photo from the equation and giving it a quick mention will increase the communication of donations.
4. They take up the limited resources we have to put out a quality newspaper. How can I, as an editor, assign a reporter to take a donation photo at 1 p.m. instead of writing a story about one of your neighbors, or about an issue important to you? I can't, and I won't do it anymore.
5. They don't tell 1,000 words. Huh? You know that old phrase: a picture tells 1,000 words. Check-passing photos don't tell 1,000 words. I can sum them up in about 10: "Person or group gives money to other person or group." There. Nine hundred ninety to spare.
So how will this new policy work? We're happy to still cover large fund-raising events. If there's a pancake supper, for instance, we'll run pictures of people cooking and eating pancakes. But we need to know about the event in advance. Or, to name another example, if the school had a bunch of computers donated, we could take pictures of students using the computers. We need photos that tell stories.
If there's not a photo opportunity like that available, we're happy to run the text in the new donations area in the society section. There is no charge, and the information can be easily submitted by dropping off a note, calling us, e-mailing me or faxing me. Something simple like "The Wadena ABC group raised $1,424 through its candy bar sales and donated it all to the food shelf" will do the trick.
If there's a large community drive underway, such as United Way's annual campaign, or a sustained effort like the expansion of the Wadena Community Center or the Depot renovation project, we'd be happy to publish updates as often as the organizers provide them -- even weekly if it warrants. Something like "the Wadena-Deer Creek school foundation received $1,800 in donations in December, bringing the total raised for the year to $50,150."
This change will not be easy, and many will feel slighted by the new policy. I'm certain people will accuse me of not caring about the community when they criticize the new stance, but nothing could be further from the truth. I once stood before a crowd of leaders of non-profit organizations, and told them to stop relying on check-passing photos and thank-you letters to the editor (which we don't allow either, incidentally) because although they felt good about seeing them in the newspaper, it wasn't communicating their message nearly as well as they assumed it was. That wasn't an easy message to deliver, but it was a truthful one. I think the easy thing would have been to humor them, put the photo in and act like people really read it. But it's not fair to them to let them think that, and it's not fair to readers to subject them to that just to avoid telling a difficult truth.
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It's our hope that doing away with something our readers tell us they don't pay attention to, and beginning a new way of delivering similar information, will give you a tool to see the charitable flows of money in this community in a more useful package.
