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Comment by brookst | Hacker News Reader

Why is that infuriating? It’s accurate, acknowledges the suboptimal photo choice (or availability), and has some humor. As an editor, given this as your only photo choice, what caption would you write?

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>As an editor, given this as your only photo choice, what caption would you write?

I would just not include a photo at all.

As a reader, I want to have a sense of scale of the tower.

Of course. The scale is 200 feet, as described in the article. Maybe you want it in football fields?

A picture is worth a thousand words. 200 feet tall and how thick are the bars? How many? Could I do it with a hacksaw or would I need a more intense torch? I want to visualize perpetrating the crime.

It's hard to correctly visualize something when the provided visuals are abhorrently wrong, though, isn't it?

There's a world of difference between an old free-standing Long Lines tower and the straight-and-narrow guyed tower that actually disappeared, just as there is also a world of difference stature between Roseanne Barr and Gwen Stefani.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but each of those thousand words has negative value when they're simply wrong.

Smoots.

And that photo totally fails to convey the scale. Pictures of the actual radio tower were posted elsewhere here and it's way smaller.

Yes, and what the wrong photo does is fuck with your sense of scale entirely. The included tower is more of an industrial installation; the real tower is more like something a couple drunk metal thieves could salvage in an evening.

Question is moot because I would just do my job to the minimum acceptable standard of competence by sourcing a picture of the actual tower

How and where would you source it from? The tower is gone, there's likely no public domain images of it, no stock images of it, so where do you get a picture of it?

Somebody else here in the comments found it on Google Maps https://maps.app.goo.gl/Y9QMBDPnazGT1cgj9

I feel like that would be part of the bare minimum of your job for a newspaper.

See, that'd be my job as a photo editor. To know the answer. That's the job. That's what makes it a real job when actually done right. Any high school age intern can find a picture of a random radio tower.

If you can't meet that standard, don't run a photo, or don't run the story. The world won't come to a standstill because a partisan rag from a provincial backwater didn't run a filler item about a wacky heist halfway across the world.

In other words, you don't know how practical or not it is to find a picture of the tower and your opinion on the subject is worthless.

It doesn't matter how practical it is. What matters is, the only honest course of action is to not include a photo of a wrong tower if it's not practical to find a photo of the right one.

So...a picture of some random sky? Maybe draw an outline of what the tower would look like if it were there?

'Artist renditions' are used for space news, criminal descriptions, etc. maybe not such a crazy idea here.

Sure, for high profile things. This is the daily news and a mild curiosity which is hardly worth the resources. Show a picture of a similar model tower, annotate it as such, and I have now have a sense of the difficulty in cutting it down.

That's the thing: you don't. The difficulty of cutting it down is what is the major difference between the real tower and the depicted one.

It's mocking. It's like a subtle middle finger to those who suspected something here makes no sense and decided to look more carefully at the photo.

Like others said, I too would choose to not include any photo at all - there's no way to frame inclusion of a wrong photo as something good.

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