Twister: A case study in a reader-submitted news photo
An interesting case study on dealing with reader-submitted content emerged in the aftermath of the Little Sioux tornado that killed four Boy Scouts in western Iowa on Wednesday, June 11.
By Friday, I learned from colleagues within Lee Enterprises (owners of the Post-Dispatch and STLtoday.com) that a “reader-submitted photo” had been circulating, purportedly of that event. Here’s the photo.
An e-mail thread among Lee online editors was querying where the photo had come from — and whether it was a hoax. (UPDATE: I got permission later to use an e-mail from Thomas Ritchie, online director at the Sioux City Journal, excerpted here):
…the attached photo keeps showing up in our in-boxes as a “reader” photo from (fill in the blank) tornado.
We received the photo the day after the Little Sioux tornado and it was supposedly from that area, but the morning before it had been posted on the Globe Gazette’s reader photo site.
If anyone can identify it as a real photo (with a photog’s name and real location), I’d be happy to pass on the info to the numerous folks who keep sending it to us.
As Ritchie noted, that very picture had been published in the Mason City Globe Gazette web site the day before. According to that story:
Lori Mehmen, who lives on Main Street in Orchard, took a photo from just outside her front door of a large funnel cloud forming shortly after 9 p.m.
“It almost looked like it was going to to take the (grain) elevator,” she said.
The funnel cloud came near the ground just briefly and then went back up in the clouds.
“It was like deja vu,” said Mehmen, who survived the 1968 Charles City tornado.
Editors there had obviously talked to the photographer (the town’s city clerk) and verifed the image. Additionally, during the e-mail thread, another Lee editor peeked under the hood on the photo.
“I ran a basic check on this photo and it seems that it was taken on the 10th of June around 8 p.m. central. If the file had been altered, coming out of Photoshop or something similar, then you wouldn’t be able to append the camera data, back into the file information dataset, without a considerable amount of work. So, in my opinion, it would appear, that it is likely that this photo is authentic,” said Christopher J. Donahue, interactive products manager at the RapidCityJournal.com.
He included this screen shot.
A quick check on snopes.com found an example of a similar issue: A legitimate photo that gets passed around as if it were from the latest big storm. This photo has been claimed to be from storms in Florida and Missouri.
UPDATE: Someone needs to tell CNN to deal with the mis-captioned photo on iReport.
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View Comments on Twister: A case study in a reader-submitted news photo
Great article – thankfully this photo caption regarding the boy scout camp tragedy is being debunked widely:
http://www.meteorologynews.com/2008/06/14/fake-tornado-photograph-falsely-attributed-to-boy-scout-camp-storm/
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