CMS's say the darnedest things, #3

Sometimes the programmers or designers who code a newspaper's style into a production system (for print or online) want to be helpful, so they embed little shortcuts into the system to "save typing" or to help make the publication more consistent.

In this case, someone has decided that every image that could carry a creator's credit is a photo, and that every photo is "by" some person.

This is nit-picking, yes. But a commercial newspaper is presumptively a professionally-written, professionally-edited creation, and as such, should be a standard-bearer for both content and style. A newspaper should demonstrate effective communication, rather than daring readers to read around pointless eccentricities hidden in the software that puts the paper together.

For what it's worth, I first confronted this class of problem around 1986 when I naively hard-coded a similar "photo by" credit into a print-publishing system. The editors and production manager identified the problem with that approach the first time a non-photo image needed a credit...

[ Boston Herald, July 14, 2008 ]