Copy Desk Friday the 13th, Part 1: Mugshots

We had a reporter who wrote an outdoors column for nearly 30 years. By the 2000s he had a normal mugshot to run with it, but back in the 1970s and 80s it was him pointing a .44 at the camera.

 

Back when the Dick brothers were playing quarterback at Arkansas, the Little Rock paper had a policy of only printing last names with mugs and using last names in headlines.

So Dick. Anyway it happens the first time and publisher/owner throws a fit. So try start using first and last name.

Local alt weekly picks up on it. Calls paper's editor who then denies policy had changed. But it was first and last name for mugs and mighty Casey in headlines or just QB.

It was odd but it lead to a mighty fine dirty headline writing contest here.

Coach was Nutt. Backup was Johnson.

"Nutt slides Dick into No. 2 hole"

Nutt pulls limp Dick

Etc etc etc.

 

When I was on the news side of the copy desk, we'd always get complaints from readers about running "goofy-looking" mugs of George W. Bush. At my next job, where my responsibilities included updating the home page on a Florida newspaper's website, the managing editor once passed along similar reader complaints about mugshots of Gov. Rick Scott. Former co-workers at my old shop tell me they field complaints about mugshots of Gov. Scott and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, along with gripes about photos that "make President Obama's ears look too big." It's like readers think we're engaging in partisanship or trying to make these political figures look silly, but the truth is that they simply aren't very photogenic, and not much can be done about it.

 

I worked at a small paper once that covered somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 or 6 small cities over two counties and one of the mayors just simply couldn't take a picture where he didn't look like a constipated bullfrog

 

Don't forget that the third-stringer at the time was Mitch Mustain.
So you could have had "Dick busted by Nutt as Johnson rises; Mustain left on bench"

 

We ran the story on Hillary Clinton last week and got a complaint that we obviously hate her because, in the complainers' opinion, we picked the worst possible picture of her to run.

And going back up in this thread a ways, many moons ago, we had a page designer - in the days before they were called designers, who ran mug shot of all 14 or 15 starters in the Kentucky Derby the Saturday morning of the race on the sports front.

 

Right now our paper is covering a trial of a case that began with the victim's body found in a U-Haul rental van (In fact, we call it the "U-Haul trial" here).

When the discovery of the body was made, it was soon found out that the victim was killed in a gang-related murder in a local house, where a few people tortured the guy before killing him, and others covered it up.

They ended up making 11 arrests, and of course they had mugshots for all of them. This was back when we were still paginating in-house, and they wanted me to put all 11 mugs on the jump. I had to place and resize all 11 and then place them. As it turns out, because we were using a Quark program that was about four versions behind, every second or third mug would crash the program when placed. It took me forever to get that done, but fortunately I had the presence of mind to transfer all the placed mug onto a separate Quark file, with instructions to the rest of the copy desk to just go into that file and copy and paste whenever they needed to.

Fortunately for our purposes, a few of the arrestees made plea bargains and the number of people actually going to trial was about five or six.

 

MPC, the worst for me were the local "distinguished young woman scholarship program" previews (PLEASE! It's not a BEAUTY PAGEANT!) About 15-20 short bios of the girls, with glamour mugs of each, usually on a broken inside page.

I chose to run the mugs in a large group — three rows of five mugs, in alphabetical order — rather than jamming one mug with each matching paragraph on the don't-call-her-a-contestant. Looked a lot better that way.

Thankfully, that preview material now runs in a full-page ad.

 

Coco's story reminds me of one shop where I was on the news desk and got assigned the students of the month page. About a dozen mugs and stories, too much to fit on one page. Longest one was the high school SOM, and she mentioned how much she enjoyed working on the student paper. "That's nice," I thought. "Welcome to the first lesson: Editing." and sliced her story from 10 inches down to 4-5.