Who's that girl...or is it a bloke?
Depending on your status as a celebrity and your relationship with the media, if you are famous you can expect to see pictures of yourself in the paper either smiling on some red carpet somewhere or reeling drunk in the gutter showing your knickers.
If you are famous you probably have your own file in the newspaper vault. If you are lucky this has pictures of you in clean, ironed clothes. If you are unlucky this has pictures of your cellulite. If you are really unlucky this has your police mug-shot and if dame fortune has crapped on you after embarking on a high-fibre diet, this will contain those ‘glamour’ shots you did at the start of your career.
Ordinary people pictured in the paper used to fall into three categories. You either looked startled as you walked to court and some snapper papped you, or you looked happy as you lifted some sort of trophy aloft, or you had a blanket over your head and the caption described you as ‘the accused’ or, possibly ‘the beast’.
The saddest photographs on front pages were those posed school photographs. You felt your heart drop into your shoes because you knew that the picture of the smiling child was not on the front page because it was a slow news day and the kid was related to the editor. When you saw a picture of an entire class, with nobody ringed, it was time to reach for the bottle. I guess class photographs were used because these were the ones most available to the journos, either from the parents or an underpaid school caretaker.
The internet has changed all that though. Recently, high-school gunmen have taken to putting their declarations of insanity on YouTube and so that’s where newspapers go for video grabs – although to be honest they could just have been using the same shot of some acne ridden git in a ‘slipknot’ hoodie, as that’s what all these kids look like.
Worse, they have started to comb social networking sites like MyFace for pictures of missing teens, tragic teens or teens that may well have done something nasty to other teens. This is why one should be careful about the photographs one puts into the public domain. Do you really want, next to the headline ‘suspect held in gnome theft case’, a picture of you simulating sex with a soft toy, because you thought it was a laugh to have it on your home page.
Worse still, do you want to rely on a lazy, pissed up journo getting the right image? The last thing you need is to have a name close to that of a notorious donkey shagger so that on his arrest you see that photograph of yourself taken last Christmas when you were playing twister after getting pissed and the caption ‘mule molester busted’.
So one should be careful what one posts, and what one does, and what one is pictured doing. Or simply emboss all pictures of yourself with the watermark: ‘in my defence, I had been drinking’.
If you are famous you probably have your own file in the newspaper vault. If you are lucky this has pictures of you in clean, ironed clothes. If you are unlucky this has pictures of your cellulite. If you are really unlucky this has your police mug-shot and if dame fortune has crapped on you after embarking on a high-fibre diet, this will contain those ‘glamour’ shots you did at the start of your career.
Ordinary people pictured in the paper used to fall into three categories. You either looked startled as you walked to court and some snapper papped you, or you looked happy as you lifted some sort of trophy aloft, or you had a blanket over your head and the caption described you as ‘the accused’ or, possibly ‘the beast’.
The saddest photographs on front pages were those posed school photographs. You felt your heart drop into your shoes because you knew that the picture of the smiling child was not on the front page because it was a slow news day and the kid was related to the editor. When you saw a picture of an entire class, with nobody ringed, it was time to reach for the bottle. I guess class photographs were used because these were the ones most available to the journos, either from the parents or an underpaid school caretaker.
The internet has changed all that though. Recently, high-school gunmen have taken to putting their declarations of insanity on YouTube and so that’s where newspapers go for video grabs – although to be honest they could just have been using the same shot of some acne ridden git in a ‘slipknot’ hoodie, as that’s what all these kids look like.
Worse, they have started to comb social networking sites like MyFace for pictures of missing teens, tragic teens or teens that may well have done something nasty to other teens. This is why one should be careful about the photographs one puts into the public domain. Do you really want, next to the headline ‘suspect held in gnome theft case’, a picture of you simulating sex with a soft toy, because you thought it was a laugh to have it on your home page.
Worse still, do you want to rely on a lazy, pissed up journo getting the right image? The last thing you need is to have a name close to that of a notorious donkey shagger so that on his arrest you see that photograph of yourself taken last Christmas when you were playing twister after getting pissed and the caption ‘mule molester busted’.
So one should be careful what one posts, and what one does, and what one is pictured doing. Or simply emboss all pictures of yourself with the watermark: ‘in my defence, I had been drinking’.
Labels: Facebook, Journalism, Media, Myspace, Newspapers, Photography, Social networking sites
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