The Editor's Desk

Each month I post to The Editor’s Desk the winners of our monthly headline contest. There are, however, a few newsroom contests that aren’t getting the blog love they deserve. So, let’s remedy that.

The photograph you see at left (click on it to see a larger version) is Fernando Salazar’s shot of WSU basketball coach Gregg Marshall’s reaction to the season-ending injury of one of his players. It took first place in January’s best-photo contest.

Second place went to Bo Rader for his picture of a KU touchdown in the Orange Bowl. Third place was a tie between Jaime Oppenheimer’s touching image of three girls at the end of a dance, and Mike Hutmacher’s silhouette of construction work on the downtown arena.

Don’t forget that if you want to purchase one of these or any other picture from The Eagle, all you have to do is click on the “Buy Photos & Pages” link on the left side of most Kansas.com pages. If you don’t feel like clicking back to the main site from the comfy confines of our blogs, here’s a direct link.

Putting together the paper each day is a series of questions. Some of them, such as which stories we place on the front page and which will go inside the Local&State section, have obvious answers. When the questions revolve around matters of taste or values, things aren’t quite as simple. The past two nights, the appropriateness of two photographs fell into that realm.

The first photo ran on Page 1B on Wednesday. It accompanied a story about a mural created by Nick Salazar, a senior at Metro-Boulevard Alternative High School. To answer a question in his social studies class – If Jesus Christ, Mohammed and Buddha were to reappear on Earth tomorrow, would they be capitalist, socialist or communist? – Salazar created an illustration on an old chalkboard in his classroom. The mural, which included drawings of Jesus, Mohammed and Buddha, was a prominent part of the photo we ran.

Here was the issue: Many Muslims find artistic depictions of Mohammed blasphemous. With that in mind, do we run the photo, not run it or, since the drawing of Mohammed was on the far right side of the photo, crop that portion off?

After talking to several people I decided we should run it as is. There were a couple of reasons for that decision. First, the photo was germane. The story was beautifully written and didn’t go the easy “look at the cool thing this student did” route. The story was deeper than that and the photo enhanced it by showing readers exactly what was created. Second, I’m sure there are many things we report on that some people don’t think we should cover or don’t like to see or read about. My opinion, however, is that decisions based on fear or second-guessing usually will result in a wrong choice.

The second photo that led to discussions ran on Page 8A on Thursday with the tornadoes story. It showed a man and his daughter looking at ruins of his other daughter’s home in Shirley, Ark. The second daughter was among those killed when a tornado went through the town. Her body was found lying next to that of her 14-year-old Labrador retriever. In the foreground of the photo was the body of the dog.

The photo made me pause. Was this something readers really needed to see? To be honest, I have tremendous affection for dogs and the photo disturbed me deeply. That reaction, though, is appropriate. Dozens of people died in the storms and we should be bothered by the death and destruction. Ultimately, I decided that running the photo, including the dog’s body, created a stronger emotional impact than just a shot of the family looking at the ruins.

So, would you have made the same decision or gone another way? Click on the comments link on the left and tell me what you would have done.