Earlier this week The New York Times made its first foray onto Tumblr with The Lively Morgue, which showcases vintage photographs from the newspaper’s print archive, which is known as “the morgue” for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, according to the Times.

“[Launching a Tumblr blog] made sense for a lot of reasons,” says deputy photo editor Meaghan Looram, who was one of several Times staffers who worked on the project. “Obviously Tumblr is a super visual platform and on top of that, from what I understand, vintage photography is really popular on Tumblr.”

In addition to showing the scans of vintage photographic prints, The Lively Morgue’s custom design also allows viewers to inspect the backs of the prints, where they can see editors’ markings, original captions and other information about the images, and the way the newsroom trafficked and filed them.

“For someone that’s not interested in that level of detail they can appreciate the fronts of the images,” Looram notes, “but I think [showing the backs of the prints] gives the project a really nice level of sophistication and added value. And for people that are interested in photo archiving or photo history or the history of the paper, I think it’s just a really interesting level of detail.”

Through its first few days, the Times‘ Tumblr has featured photographs from the 1930s, 50s, 60s and 70s, ranging in subject matter from sports to fashion to crime. As of Wednesday night, the blog already had roughly 10,000 followers, Looram says. Several of the images had hundreds of notes and reblogs.

Looram notes there is some concern over the amount of control the Times is relinquishing, because Tumblr allows for rapid sharing and dissemination of content. To encourage people who like the images they see on Tumblr to buy prints, The Lively Morgue features a link to a Times store where prints can be ordered. “In a lot of cases these are prints that you can buy through our store, so we’re hoping that people will do that,” Looram explains. “But I think that that’s something that we have to be concerned about even with images on our Web site.”

Though The Lively Morgue links to a print store, Looram says the project was “primarily motivated by an interest in editorially getting these images seen, and also finding an appropriate foray for us into Tumblr.”

The project, which was based on a series of posts picture editor Darcy Eveleigh created on the Times‘ photojournalism blog, Lens, originated with Heena Koh, a member of the Times’ digital design team, and Alexis Mainland, the social media editor. Looram says everyone working on it is doing it “in addition to their own duties” because they are excited about the platform and the opportunity to share the archive.

The social media success of the Lens blog, and of the Times‘ photography in general, also generated energy, Looram says. “I think we’re very encouraged by the popularity of the Lens blog and the amount of sharing in social networks about our photography and photography that we’re highlighting, so that’s definitely encouraging to us and probably was a good indicator for the level of interest we would see in a project like The Lively Morgue.”

A series of photographs Robert Frank made in 1958 on commission for The New York Times, which were once thought to have been thrown out, have been discovered by the family of Louis Silverstein, a longtime art director at the Times. The photographs are featured today on the Times‘ Lens blog.

A year before he published his groundbreaking book The Americans, Frank was hired to create the photographs by Silverstein, who headed the Times’ promotions department at the time. The images were used for a promotional book distributed to Times advertisers.

The images depict New Yorkers, many of them carrying or reading copies of the Times, going about their business on the streets, in taxis, at the airport, and at notable locations such as Grand Central Station and the Statue of Liberty.

Silverstein’s wife, Helen, recently discovered the prints with the help of Jeff Roth, a Times librarian. The prints remain with the Silverstein family. Some of the photographs were not published at that the time in the promotional book, and have not previously been seen.

A previous version of this blog post stated incorrectly that the photographs had been rediscovered in the Times’ archive.

The Sacramento Bee image at the center of the latest doctored news image scandal.

Surely we all know the script by now: A newspaper photographer gets caught manipulating a photo, the paper runs an apology with a statement about the newspaper’s zero-tolerance policy and a notice that the photographer has been fired; a trade organization villifies the photographer to warn others and keep the whole profession from going down a slippery slope to perdition. Along the way, a contrarian pundit may or may not weigh in.

So let’s fill in the blanks. The newspaper this time is The Sacramento Bee. The photographer is Bryan Patrick. The offending image showed a snowy egret gobbling a frog it had just snatched from a great egret. It was created from two images of the scene, one of which was the decisive moment of the theft, and the other of which had the better view of the frog in the snowy egret’s bill.

The paper published all three images an online correction and apology Feb 1, with reference to policy against photo manipulation, followed by a “to our readers” notice on Feb 4 announcing Patrick had been fired for violating the paper’s ethics policy. The note concluded with a recitation of the paper’s policy against the manipulation of photographs.

The president of NPPA called Patrick’s action a “betrayal” (in a story published by Poynter): “If this photographer in Sacramento can diddle around with a photograph of an egret, how can I know that any photograph I look at is trustworthy?” he asked.

The contrarian this time is On the Media host Bob Garfield, writing for The Guardian. He satirizes Patrick as “the Great Satan” and says “let him suffer the fate of the frog!” He then raises that pesky question: “Don’t all journalists alter reality?” Finally, he asks this rhetorical humdinger: “[d]id he [Patrick] misrepresent the story, or did he perhaps just make it clearer?”

But wait. The ritual isn’t over until Patrick’s peers pile on, either for him or against him. Readers?

Reporters Without Borders ranked the United States 47th on their 2011-2012 Press Freedom Index, down 27 places from the previous year, tied with Argentina and Romania.

“In the space of two months in the United States, more than 25 [journalists] were subjected to arrests and beatings at the hands of police who were quick to issue indictments for inappropriate behaviour, public nuisance or even lack of accreditation,” Reporters Without Borders wrote in their report. The US “owed its fall” to arrests and harassment related to coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement, the non-profit reporters’ rights group said.

The drop saw the US ranked just above Latvia, and Trinidad and Tobago, which fell 20 places due to a scandal involving the government spying on journalists.

In a statement released along with the index today, Reporters Without Borders noted that “Many media [around the world] paid dearly for their coverage of democratic aspirations or opposition movements…. Crackdown was the word of the year in 2011.”

In North African and Middle East, the Arab uprisings greatly affected the rankings of several nations. In Tunisia and Libya rose in the index as censorious regimes were deposed. Egypt, however, fell 39 places in the index due in part to “The hounding of foreign journalists for three days at the start of February, the interrogations, arrests and convictions of journalists and bloggers by military courts, and the searches without warrants,” the report said.

Syria and Yemen were already lowly ranked, so their crackdowns on demonstrations and journalists only caused them to sink a bit lower. Iran fell in the rankings to 175. China, “which has more journalists, bloggers and cyber-dissidents in prison than any other country,” the report notes, also ranked near the bottom of the index at 174.

Eritrea was the worst nation in the ranking for a fifth straight year, and its Horn of Africa neighbors Somalia and Sudan also received low rankings as part of an East African region where journalists are regularly subjected to violence, censorship and lengthy prison sentences served in awful conditions.

The Press Freedom Index is calculated using a scoring system based on a questionnaire distributed to partner organizations, a network of 150 correspondents around the world, and to journalists, researchers, jurists and human rights activists.

For the full report and more on the creation of the index, see the full Reporters Without Borders release.

Related: New York Times Photographer Blocked by NYPD
Photogs Arrested in Raid on Occupy Protest at Zuccotti Park

The Committee to Protect Journalists says Mohamed Shaglouf, the driver hired by The New York Times who went missing in Libya last March, is dead. (Update: the CPJ informs PDN that it first reported Shaglouf’s death in early November.)

CPJ lists Shaglouf among 5 media workers killed on the job during 2011. In addition, CPJ says a total of 80 journalists died last year–45 of them killed in crossfire or in retribution for their reporting, and another 35 for whom the motives of their deaths have not been confirmed.

Shaglouf was working for four Times journalists, including photographers Lynsey Addario and Tyler Hicks, who were arrested at a checkpoint by fighters loyal to former Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi. They reported after their release six days later that they had lost sight of Shaglouf at the time of their arrest.

CPJ says it was told by the Times on November 7 that Shaglouf was killed at the checkpoint, according to information the Times attributed to Shaglouf’s brother.

Reporter Anthony Shadid, who was one of the four Times journalists detained at the checkpoint, also recently acknowledged during a radio interview with Terry Gross of WHYY in Philadelphia that Shaglouf was killed.

Last spring, before Shaglouf’s fate was known, Times editor Bill Keller angrily defended the paper’s treatment of fixers in the wake of accusations that the Times–and other major news organizations–don’t do enough to take care of “local hires” who are hurt, killed, or captured on the job.

“We fulfill our obligation to employees, including  local hires, who are hurt or killed in the line of duty, and to their  families in the case of death. (Yes, this includes Mohamed Shaglouf.)” Keller told the Poynter Institute last May.

The Times did not respond to PDN’s request in September for information about Shaglouf’s fate, or about any compensation that the paper might be providing to his family.

Among the 45 journalists who died in 2011 because of their work, CPJ lists 6 photographers: Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros, who died while covering the fighting in Libya last April 20; Anton Hemmerl, who died April 5, also while covering the fighting in Libya; Jamal al-Sharaabi, a photojournalist for the independent weekly Al-Masdar, who died while covering Arab Spring demonstrations in Yemen on March 18; Lucas Mebrouk Dolega, killed January 17 while covering the uprising in Tunisia; and Luis Emanuel Ruiz Carillo, a photographer for La Prensa in Monclova, Mexico who was abducted and shot by unknown assailants on March 25.

Related stories:

Talking About the Deaths We Don’t Talk About
What To Expect from Clients If You’re Injured on Assignment
Libya Says it Will Release Times Journalists Today

© Korea Central News Agency

The photo of the funeral of Kim Jung-Il distributed by the Korean Central News Agency, the official news agency of North Korea, was stunning: Limousines driving in formation behind a giant portrait of the Supreme Leader, rows of mourners lining their route, snow whitening the ground, a giant North Korean flag billowing majestically at the top of the frame. It was picture perfect. Too perfect, apparently.

Today The New York Times Lens Blog compares the image from the official news agency with one taken at almost the same moment by a photographer with Kyodo News of Japan, and distributed by AP. Working with digital forensics expert Hany Farid of Dartmouth, they show that the image from Korean Central was Photoshopped. The Lens blog goes into lots of detail, showing (with several close ups) that some men standing on the sidelines with a camera were erased, replaced with cloned snow. (Read more about their analytical methods and see the photos here.)

Lens reports that the doctored photo had been distributed by European Pressphoto Agency, Reuters and Agence-France Presse (AFP) before the retouching was discovered by The New York Times (which had also, briefly, run the image on its Web site). Once Lens reported

Undoctored photo, © Kyodo News

that the photo was doctored, the three agencies issued kill notices, Lens reports. “This photo was altered from the source and not by AFP,” the agency noted.

Gee, if you can’t trust an official news photo from the government of a secretive nation with a history of repressing journalism, who can you trust?

Maybe the agencies can be excused for not anticipating that such a stage-managed spectacle would be doctored. The retouching doesn’t seem politically motivated, as in all those airbrushed photos from Stalinist Russia. Why would a North Korean photo editor go to the trouble of Photoshopping out a few anonymous figures?

The Lens blog offers one explanation: “totalitarian esthetics.”

“With the men straggling around the sidelines, a certain martial perfection is lost. Without the men, the tight black bands of the crowd on either side look railroad straight.” When it comes to stage-managed spectacle, symmetry is all.

Prosecutors have decided not to “issue any tickets” against a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel photographer arrested while covering an Occupy protest near the University of Wisconsin last month, the newspaper has reported.

It is unclear from the report what grounds prosecutors may have had–if any–for issuing tickets.

The photographer, Kristyna Wentz-Graff, was arrested while photographing the protest November 2, and taken to a police station in downtown Milwaukee. The Journal Sentinel reported at the time that she was arrested “without warning [and] without being told why she was being arrested.”

In video footage that circulated online showing a police officer grabbing Wentz-Graff and handcuffing her, the photographer’s press credentials were clearly visible, and she was carrying two cameras–one with a very large lens. (A still photo of her arrest can be seen here.) Bystanders also reportedly told police she was a working journalist as they arrested her.

Under criticism for the arrest, and protest from the Journal Sentinel, police said at the time they had no idea she was a journalist until after they arrived with Wentz-Graff at the police station.

The mayor of Milwaukee reportedly said shortly after the arrest that it was clear to him from the video footage that Wentz-Graff was a journalist, and he added, “I very much support her First Amendment right to be there.”

Related: Pictures of Photog’s Arrest Force Police Accountability

Over on PDNOnline we’ve gathered together the biggest photography news stories of 2011, a year marked infringements on the rights of photographers, by sticky legal cases whose results will be felt long into the future, and by tragedy. The 15 stories we highlighted were the most-read news articles and blog posts on PDNOnline and PDN Pulse this year.

Which of these stories do you think was the most important news story of the year? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

A new video making the rounds on the Internet captured a police officer preventing New York Times freelance photographer Robert Stolarik from taking photographs of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protestors getting arrested at the World Financial Center on December 12, 2011. In November, multiple media outlets signed a letter sent to Police Commissioner Ray Kelly complaining about the treatment of journalists covering the OWS movement. In response to the complaint, Commissioner Kelly ordered officers not to impede any journalists from reporting on the protests. The officer in the video appears to be violating that order.

The video, which was recently uploaded to YouTube, shows officers creating a “human wall” in order to  purposefully block onlookers from taking photos and videos of the arrests. However, around the two-minute mark, it becomes apparent that one officer repeatedly prevents Stolarik, whose press badge is clearly visible, from photographing the arrest by placing his body in front of the camera’s lens. In response to the video, various Web sites are reporting that the assistant general counsel for The New York Times has sent another letter to Commissioner Kelly.

Related blog posts:
Photogs Arrested in Raid on Occupy Protest at Zuccotti Park
Video Shows Police Shooting Photographer

The arrest of Milwaukee Journal Sentinel photographer Kristyna Wentz-Graff (©Lita Medinger)

Once again, police officers have arrested a photographer doing her job–this time in Milwaukee–only to let her go a few hours later without charges. The summary round-up of journalists at street demonstrations is a form of intimidation, and rough injustice: It’s a convenient way of putting journalists out of commission for the duration of a police action. But with cameras so ubiquitous now, it’s ultimately a losing strategy for police.

In Milwaukee, Journal Sentinel photographer Kristyna Wentz-Graff was arrested last Wednesday while photographing a peaceful Occupy demonstration. Just before she arrived on the scene, police had ordered protestors to leave the street. Police had blocked the street with their cars, and started making arrests. Wentz-Graff started taking pictures of an arrest as soon as she arrived.

According to the Journal Sentinel, “While she was taking pictures, she was grabbed by an officer, handcuffed and arrested, without warning or without being told why she was being arrested.”

Under criticism for violating the First Amendment rights of a journalist, the Milwaukee police chief held a news conference Thursday to defend his officers. He said the arresting officer thought the photographer was a protester and added that her status as a journalist “was not obvious to the officers” at the scene.

But looking at the pictures taken by others of the arrest, one has to wonder: Do Milwaukee police officers need to get their eyes checked? Wentz-Graff had her press ID badge clearly visible, as an image by Lita Medinger in the Journal Sentinel shows, and two cameras around her neck–one of them with a very large Canon telephoto lens that screamed “journalist.”(That camera and lens are hidden behind the police car in the Journal Sentinel image, but were clearly visible in this  TV video of the arrest.)

The mayor, after watching a TV video of the arrest, said to the Journal Sentinel, “It appeared very clear to me that she was a photojournalist.” He added, “I very much support her First Amendment right to be there.”

The police chief acknowledged that Wentz-Graff had “big fancy cameras,” but protestors carry cameras, too, he noted. And he added, “According to the officer at the scene, he didn’t notice her ID. He was just focusing on the task at hand. He perceived her as part of the problem he had to solve.”

Fair enough. But with his boss in the hot seat, the arresting officer has probably been advised to pay more attention to what he’s doing.

More importantly, though, Milwaukee’s police chief has pledged to try to make things right with the media. He says he’s going to meet with editors of various Milwaukee news outlets to examine police policy, and “identify those circumstances in which the perception is we are not playing fair with the press and let’s correct it.”

It’s hard not to imagine that all the pictures of the incident had a lot to do with an outcome that’s so good for the First Amendment, and for democracy. It’s not too much of a leap to argue that the whole Occupy movement has been at least partially protected by a force field of cameras. A few incidents of police brutality have resulted in more support for the movement, and widespread condemnation of the police departments involved (in New York City and Oakland, California.)

The police certainly do a tough, important job protecting us from crime, but to avoid accountability by arresting photojournalists, they’re going to have to arrest pretty much every bystander with a cell phone.