DATE: Sunday, November 16, 1997             TAG: 9711150001

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J5   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: LYNN FEIGENBAUM

                                            LENGTH:  101 lines

REPORT TO READERS A PICTURE (ERROR) IS WORTH 1,000 WORDS

``Hello, this is James Etheridge, and I'm alive.''

Well, that's one way to answer the phone. And it was the way that Dr. James E. Etheridge Jr. chose on Wednesday when I dialed his home in Matthews County, Va.

I was amused and chagrined, but not surprised. An obituary story that morning in The Pilot, ``Affable father of Virginia Beach finances dies,'' had been accompanied by a photo of Dr. James Etheridge. Unfortunately, the condolences were for V. Alfred ``Jack'' Etheridge, a pioneer city treasurer of Virginia Beach, who died Monday.

Dr. James, former dean and provost of Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk, is alive and well and busily retired. The two Etheridges are not related.

Before hearing about the photo mixup, I was pleased to see the story about Jack Etheridge. On Tuesday, a relative of the late city official had called and wondered why there was a paid obit but no story about the man who had helped shape the fiscal future of Virginia Beach.

I agreed with her that it had been an oversight and pitched the story to columnist Guy Friddell. The words were Guy's but not the photo; a photo editor had pulled the wrong Etheridge file from the library.

Compounding the error, the photo also appeared on the Hampton Roads section masthead, as a teaser to the story, and in Pilot Online, where Dr. Etheridge first spotted the error.

``Those things happen,'' said the affable and forgiving James Etheridge. ``People try to do their very best and those things slip by.''

He was even forgiving late Wednesday afternoon, after phone calls from concerned friends and relatives pretty much drove him out of the house (and me out of the office).

Dr. James moved out of Norfolk a year ago. But he's still in town a lot as an active member of the EVMS development committee and as a consulting pediatric neurologist at St. Mary's Infant Home. Some of the half-dozen calls we got about the photo error came from his medical colleagues.

This was the second such photo goof in less than three weeks. The other one occurred in the Oct. 26 Voter's Guide, where we ran a mug shot of candidate William K. Barlow's brother, Joe, in place of the 64th District incumbent. Barlow also took it in good humor - perhaps because he was unopposed. Still, voters might have thought they got the wrong guy!

(By the way, this was one of the few election-related corrections in all our reams of political coverage.)

A different sort of photo problem arose Nov. 5 with a Daily Break wire story about the exorbitant cost of those trendy Beanie Babies. The story ran with a photo of two young sisters and a caption that implied that they had sold some of their little stuffed animals for as much as $2,200.

Not so. In fact, the file photo was used out of context. The picture of the two sisters was originally taken to go with a Beacon story about how they bought and sold the dolls for charity. In this case, we not only ran a correction but reran the original article.

The moral of the story is so obvious that it barely merits stating, but I'll toss it in anyway: Check and double-check. If a picture is worth a thousand words, obviously a picture goof stands out that much more!

ONLINE CORRECTIONS. The Case of the Wrong Etheridge brought out a relatively new dilemma in journalism: How to handle online corrections.

Like many online newspapers, Pilot Online does not have a correction policy or procedure. Our online editors keep a lookout for corrections that run in the newspaper, then fix the online story or photo. But there is no correction box to let you know that a story you read the day or hour before had an error.

Mark Edelen, one of the Pilot Online editors, feels this is an area that needs to be addressed.

In fact, the issue was raised just last month by Nancy Conner, reader advocate at the Pioneer Press in St. Paul, Minn. Like the Pilot, they run corrections on page A2, which then become part of the computer-archived story. Online readers of both PilotOnline and St. Paul's PioneerPlanet will see those corrections when they call up permanently archived stories. But they won't see corrections on breaking news stories.

A new challenge for journalism's technocrats.

ATTEN-SHUN! Some gripes and grumbles of the military kind:

No sign of Veterans Day. Two readers complained that, aside from a photo about a Women in Military Service stamp, there was nothing in Tuesday's paper about Veterans Day.

Well, there was a column on the op-ed page (and plenty of holiday ads); and the next day, two stories about Veterans Day activities in Hampton Roads. But I'll admit there wasn't a big fuss on the day itself.

Still, the Pilot has been full of military news all week, from response to the saber-rattling in Iraq to a continuing series on the future of the Navy. I'd like to think that our attention to these crucial areas are also an important salute to the military.

Not so funny. Several readers were offended by the Tuesday's ``Family Circus'' cartoon. It shows the little boy looking at a picture of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and saying, ``Why don't they check his DNA?''

I was a bit taken aback by that one, I'll admit. That's the kind of humor you expect from ``Non-Sequitur'' or ``Close to Home,'' not the wholesome family panel by Bil Keane.

Over and out. Several readers in our military community noticed a gaffe in Tuesday's photo caption with a change-of-command story. The caption said that Capt. Evan Chanik ``took over command'' of the carrier Enterprise. That should have been ``took command.''

Monitor-ing the news. And going back to Civil War days:

John Simanton, a docent at the Hampton Roads Naval Museum, notes that the Monitor's turret was iron, not steel, as stated in a Nov. 7 story on raising the ironclad's hull.

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