Reuters has 920 photos to sift through, 43 since the conflict between Lebanon and Israel escalated three weeks ago.
The company was founded in 1850 by Paul Reuter. About 10 percent of the current organization handles news. Five employees have been killed in conflicts since 2000.
US bloggers have been all over the release of photoshopped photos by the wire service, from stringer Adnan Hajj.
The altered pictures were discovered Saturday, pulled Sunday with an apology and the firing of Hajj. Today the service has tightened procedures.
The two altered photographs were among 43 that Hajj filed directly to the Reuters Global Pictures Desk since the start of the conflict on July 12 rather than through an editor in Beirut, as was the case with the great majority of his images.
Filing drills have been tightened in Lebanon and only senior staff will now edit pictures from the Middle East on the Global Pictures Desk, with the final check undertaken by the Editor-in-Charge, Reuters said.
Hajj worked for Reuters as a non-staff contributing photographer from 1993 until 2003 and again since April 2005. Most of his work was in sports photography, much of it outside Lebanon.
Hajj was not in Beirut on Monday and was not responding to calls. He told Reuters on Sunday that the image of the Israeli air strike on Beirut had dust marks which he had wanted to remove.
There have been complaints on blogs that traditional media isn’t covering this story.
Con jobs aren’t new, but they are news.Â
Norwegian publication Mann and a popular Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet have pulled two interview stories by free lance journalist Bjoern Benkow after he admitted the interviews had not taken place. The interviews were supposedly with Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrew. The fraud was discovered by Microsoft Norway. Benkow says he was financially desperate.Â
