As reported on Petapixel.com, Reuters asked its in-house photographers and freelancers cooperating with the news agency to exclusively send out of camera JPGs to their image editing team from now on. You shouldn’t consider this as a request because they expect photographers to conform to their guidelines.
As a spokesman of the news agency explained to Petapixel, the guidelines have been changed for two reasons. On the one hand they want to make sure that photos are as authentic as possible, while on the other the photos should be made available much faster to customers and agency partners.
The only question is if this will help at all. Only a couple of days ago you could see in the news about the Canadian Veerender Jubbal how seriously many journalists actually take the code of ethics. The Canadian Sikh was falsely portrayed as a terrorist and linked to the terrorist attacks in Paris. An injury to reputation of huge proportion just because of an amateurishly photoshopped picture. Well, doing some research can be as exhausting as any other job, which is the reason why many wannabe-journalists simply copy and publish without verifying their information first. And the sad thing is that nowadays you can’t even expect quality journalism from “big newspapers”.
