The Space Snatchers Run Photos that are TOO BIG!

Gilbert Cranberg is outraged. Outraged over the invasion of the HUGE graphics in newspapers. He writes about it in today’s Neiman Watchdog.

“It’s not unusual nowadays for artwork to dwarf, by large margins, the stories they illustrate. The Sunday New York Times is a major case in point. The Aug. 6 Week in Review section, for instance, devoted 34 column inches of text to a piece about Ariel Sharon but all of 55 column inches to two pics of Sharon.

The Space Snatchers attacked again on another story in the same section with a jumbo graphic that stretched the full length of the page for two columns, and then some. The graphic? Of all things, a tape measure, which, if editors had utilized one, they would have found the art had gobbled up nearly twice the space taken by the story.

Times readers tend to be intensely interested in news. They are, by and large, the proverbial news junkies. I question whether they have to be lured to stories by having them jazzed up with massive art. Unless the Times reins in its artists it may have to change its motto to, “All the news that’s fit to print, graphics permitting.”