It's a long way from the raw photo in the camera's memory or CF card and the published print. Wire services don't want to be in the business of spending time preparing a photo for publication. AP receives several thousand photos a day, it would be a very daunting task to be responsible for cropping, sizing and color correcting that many photos. A lot of the photos they put up on the wire aren't even seen by anyone at AP other than a cursory glance to make sure they are in the right orientation and not upside down. They won't even catch one that's reversed. They put 'em out there and wait to hear from members if they find anything wrong. It's not uncommon for the page designer at a major newspaper to wait until the last possible minute to get art for a front page article from AP and simply download the image and drop it into the hole on the page. They seldom pay any attention at all to the details of a photo. If it looks good on the wire they run with it.
The weak link in the chain is the shooter, it all starts there, and that link is getting weaker and weaker.
> Wire services don't want to be in the business
> of spending time ...
Then they don't get to blame the technology, which is
what they are trying to do here.
> The weak link in the chain is the shooter ...
There is a bottomless pit of photo hacks with an
agenda to drive with fake images.
If the news services fail to vet the images, they take
the heat. Reuters has earned the present scorn.