Karla's Kolumn

Every day at the Northern Wyoming Daily News there are decisions to be made including what stories are going on the front page, what photos are going on the front page and which of those on the front page go “above the fold” for people to see at newsstands.

Sometimes those decisions are easy depending on the stories and photos available. Sometimes it’s not as easy if stories or photos are scarce. It can also be difficult if the story and photo I am dealing with is a sensitive subject or tragedy. Such was the case last week.

Last Wednesday, Dec. 7, a Thermopolis man, working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, died in a plane crash in Big Horn County. His passenger survived and is in a Billings hospital. We were first notified of the crash through email when we received a photo of the crash. Without further information and not knowing the specific investigating agency I opted not to run a story Wednesday night. Later that night I did receive a press release from the Big Horn County Sheriff’s Office which I posted on the Daily News Facebook page and website.

The editorial staff updated the release the following day with a bit more information and while we obtained the information through friends we couldn’t confirm them through official sources so we ran the story without names.

When planning the front page, I knew this story, which would be discussed across the Big Horn Basin, should be above the fold. I felt, even though word had gotten out about the crash, it was still our top story that day so the placement of the story was decided.

Next came the decision on whether to run a photo and if so which one, as the person who had sent me the photo Wednesday night, sent me additional photos Thursday and the Big Horn County Sheriff’s Office also had released a photo.

I gained input from other members of our management team here at the Daily News, showing them all three photos, listening to concerns about the photos and we all agreed on the wide angle shot that appeared in Friday’s issue. We selected the wide angle for several reasons — it showed the terrain and location better than the close-up shots we had received, it showed the emergency personnel who had responded.

I made the decision to not run it as the dominant photo on the front page.

The following day on Saturday the Daily News editorial staff updated the story to include the names. It took us the better part of Friday to get the survivor’s name confirmed from a trusted and official source.

Again came the decision on placement and then whether to run a photo or not. We did run a photo, one similar to what the sheriff’s office released.

On Tuesday I received a letter to the editor from a reader who was offended by seeing “a photo of the Big Horn County airplane crash on the front page.” She doesn’t specify which photo, or if it was both, that she was offended by. We were called “heartless, insensitive and money hungry.”

I didn’t make the decision to run the photos because I was money hungry. I wasn’t being heartless or insensitive. The decisions I made I didn’t take lightly and I didn’t make alone. I consulted our management team and we discussed each photo and aired concerns with certain ones.

Without going into details about what was in the photos, know that a conscience effort was made to crop the photos in such a way as to be sensitive to the family and others who would be looking at the photos.

We tried to be sensitive.

But in reality, a photo tells more of a story than words can ever tell. It brings people into the tragedy, much more than the story can.

When people think of 9/11 they have specific images that come to mind, not specific words from a story about that fateful day.

But dealing with tragedy in photos is never easy and I’ve been on both sides where people have appreciated the photos and people have been angry like our letter writer. When working in Lovell, a family was upset with the photo selected of a fatal car crash. While I didn’t take the photo or make the ultimate decision, again there was discussion amongst the editorial staff on which photo to run.

I was the photographer at a fatal farming accident where a man ended up trapped under a tractor that he had been loading onto a trailer. Similar to the crash photo the Daily News ran in Friday’s issue, in Lovell we selected a wide angle shot showing the numerous people who were working to free the man. His wife told me later she appreciated seeing the photo because she was not there and through the photo she was able to see how many people were there and how many people had tried to save her husband.

Photos tell a story, good stories, bad stories, tragic stories. As a newspaper, we tell stories about what happens in our community, we tell those stories through words and photographs.

I hope most of our readers understand that as a community journalist working for a community newspaper, I am not insensitive and I don’t make decisions like this lightly because I understand that it impacts real people — my neighbors and my friends.