I often wonder if the professional standards of journalism are drying up in the current economic climate. I was talking to a friend of mine, a photographer who was assigned to shoot a high school wrestling meet. He was given a specific list of instructions for the shapes and sizes that his photos were required to be from each match. For example: regular horizontal for match 1, mid-vertical for match 2, etc. I couldn’t believe it. It had to be one of the more ridiculous (and insulting) things I’d heard of in a long time. Such instructions only serve to turn your creative and talented photographer into a robot.

Any editor will tell you that there are times that a photographer needs to hit a specific shape, especially in a scenario where the photo is coming in on deadline. But such pre-planning should be the last resort. Editors of the world, you are lowering the quality of your photo report every time you give a photographer a shape to shoot to. You cannot accurately predict the shape of the best photograph and when a photographer is limited to a specific shape, he/she will not be able to do his/her best work.

The best example I can think of right now is a spectacular photo my colleague Chris Detrick took at a basketball game a couple years back. It showed a guy practically getting his eyes poked out, and it later appeared in Sports Illustrated before winning a ton of awards. Guess what? It was a horizontal photograph. What if we’d planned on a mid-vertical that day? The award-winning photo doesn’t make the paper.

And now that I’ve used that term twice, just what is a “mid-vertical”? Syntax error: I have no idea what that means.

I think back to the film days when everything was harder and took longer. Even then I was never given a shape to shoot for even though we had much less time to shoot deadline stories and weren’t laying out the paper on a computer. In a pinch we would plan on a horizontal or a vertical and adapt as things came in.

The deadline was a firm 10pm and you had to account for the time to develop your film and scan in your shot. Editors sketched out their page layouts on paper and handed them off to be built by a paginator who worked on a scary computer terminal straight out of the 1980s. And still, with that serious lack of technology and tools, I can’t tell you how many times we would get a photo scanned in at 9:55 for the sports guy to size it up with a ruler (a physical, wooden ruler!) to build his page at the very last minute. Even in that tight of a crunch, the photos were edited well and displayed beautifully in the paper.

In today’s modern age, newspapers have slick page layout software that allows editors to re-size photos, auto-flow text, etc. but for some reason it seems harder to put the paper together even with all of the speedy technology.

I know there are often good reasons that people come up with ideas like the wrestling shape list that my friend’s editor gave him. But I’m more interested in quality that convenience. Having the highest quality product is always the greater reason for doing something.

I make a motion that newspapers world-wide try to publish the best photos. Period.

Will anyone second that?

Sports photography is in a golden age. With today’s equipment I often come away from a single college football game with more portfolio-quality photographs than I could have taken in an entire season twenty years ago. And after a game I want you to see those photographs. You do, to. I’ve heard from many of you on sidelines across the state.

I was especially struck by one opinion from someone who works with one of the top teams in the state. They said they wanted to see photos on the page rather than illustrations. (I’m keeping this source anonymous since it was essentially a private conversation.) They complained to me that the team went to great lengths to give us extra access to players, we made great portraits, and the result was often a small mugshot in the paper next to an illustration of a ball of flames or some other piece of clip art.

Over the past few years the Tribune has begun to rely on more illustration than it did in the past. Especially on the sports page, where the presentation of “sports-talk” types of topics has become more common. For example, if there’s a big football game coming up, you might see the big ball of flames, a panic button, or a golden egg on the page instead of a great photograph of the key players.

What can I say? The way things work at the paper right now is that I shoot an assignment, send in my best work, and that’s it. The golden egg is out of my hands.

A sense of humor helps ease the pain when your best work isn’t seen. A few weeks ago a friend uncovered a beautiful photo by Erich Hartmann in the archives of the famous Magnum Photo Agency, showing a boy reading The Salt Lake Tribune back in 1959. It was a great find and reminded me of the important role that documentary photojournalism plays in our collective history.

A few hours later, another version of the photo popped into my in box, showing what the rest of the scene may have looked like:

Thanks for the smile.