A gunman goes on a rampage on the Virginia Tech campus. 33 dead including the shooter. You are the photo editor of a small midwest daily newspaper and have access to the entire Associated Press photo report. The Associated Press moves well over 100 photos. What photo do you run on page 1? Why?

We narrowed our choices down to three images for possible use on page 1.

A photo of police carrying out a bloodied victim -

A photo of police carrying out a female victim -

And photo of police rushing to the scene -

I lobbied for the photo showing the police carrying out the female victim and that is the photo we ran large above the fold in Tuesday’s newspaper. We also chose to print the photo of the rushing police as a secondary image below that of the photo of the rescued victim.

There were disagreements among Journal editors, some of whom wanted to run the photo of the male student being carried away and some who favored the police photo. I argued that while the photo of the male victim being carried away was very strong, I was having a hard time getting past the light pole bisecting the frame. I felt the photo of the woman being rescued was just as strong. That was countered by the argument that the photo showing the female victim was “soft” – meaning out of focus looking. And it was.

I was opposed to printing the running police photo as the main photo because I felt it didn’t illustrate the scope of the shootings. The police could have been running anywhere for any purpose. We needed to show a photo of the impact of the shootings to properly illustrate this story. In this case, I argued, that meant using a photo of a victim. Arguments for the police photo were that it showed “action”.

We discarded the idea of using the police photo as the main image after it was decided to use the headline “Virginia rampage”. We thought using that photo as the lead might confuse readers into thinking that it was police that went on a rampage.

As for the photo of the male victim, the Associated Press designated the image as an “Aptopix”. That means AP editors consider it one of the best images from the “event”. AP also designated it as “EDS: NOTE GRAPHIC CONTENT” which is what AP puts in a caption if they feel the photo may be graphic. I did bring that up in our discussions, but that was a minor consideration for us considering the nature and scope of the shootings.

We ultimately decided to go with the photo of the female victim because editor Larry Myhre and I just couldn’t get past the light pole and there was a “just as good” albeit soft alternative. We did go back into the photo department, looked at the image on a computer monitor at full size and decided the image would hold up in print.

By the way, the reason it was soft (in my opinion) is because of camera shake due to slow shutter speed (photographers have adrenaline too) AND because the photo is a cropped version of this photo:

I feel the cropped version is much stronger.

I will admit that the photo of the female victim seemed softer in the paper than I believed it would, but I would not change my reasons for choosing that as my lead photo.

After looking at Tuesday front pages from around the country about one-third ran the image of the female victim (either cropped or uncropped), slightly over one-third led with the male victim and the rest ran either a non-shooting photo or a different shooting photo as their lead. Those can be seen at the Newseum front page gallery here.

The Journal did web-publish a small photo gallery of images from the shooting, so you can see a broader selection of the APs photo offering from the shootings.

Those can be seen here.