Dueling Photos

[Jim Creighton]

I know that Richard has closed the Chelman debate, but I just encountered the series of comments today and I'd like to mention a related issue. Maybe it'll be useful to you if you regularly send out publicity.

I worked for a long time as an editor in various feature sections of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and I can guarantee that nothing makes an editor grumpier than having an interview subject (or his representative) fail to disclose that he's doing a similar interview with a competing publication.

But something else that sends an editor's blood pressure soaring is receiving a publicity photo that is the same one that will later appear in an ad. I realize that this practice is fairly common in magic publications -- even top-drawer magazines like Genii and MAGIC -- but it really doesn't fly in large, general-circulation periodicals.

It's a grim moment for an editor when he picks up the paper and sees the same photo on a page twice, once with the article and once in an ad.

If you're going to be doing major publicity, you need at least two good photos -- and don't send the same one to both the feature department and the advertising department.

This is an area where organizations or convention committees putting on shows with out-of-town headliners need to be particularly careful.
Your club or your committee is going to be back asking for more publicity the following year and the year after that, and you don't want an editor worried about getting burned again.

[Richard Kaufman]

I received very few usable images from Chelman.

We were told which photo to use for the cover, which we did.

There were so few that we didn't have a choice about what to use for our opening--so we used the one with the pocket watch, which Stan Allen was told was taken specifically for the cover of MAGIC.