my passport photo |
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by Sheila
Lennon
'Bottom-up' journalism from the pros
May 30, 2002
• Today's weblog
NYT sells public
domain UFO (?) photos for $375 each: A
print of the photo, shot July 16, 1952 by Shel Alpert, a USCG seaman on duty
in the Coast Guard Weather Office at the Salem (Mass.) Coast Guard Station,
can
be seen and bought here (11" x 14" print: $195 ($173.55 for home
delivery subscribers); 16" x 20" print: $375 ($333.75 for subscribers).
Military photos
belong to the taxpayers; they are in the public domain. Nevertheless, the Times
has its watermark on the photo. Slate (How
To Tell the New York Times from the Weekly World News) called the Coast
Guard historian's office, which confirmed that prints of the flying-saucer photo
are available at the cost of reproduction, which is about $15.
But what really
upsets Slate is that the Times calls it a "historical photo" and captions
it "Flying Saucers in Salem, Mass., 1952" without putting quotes around
"flying saucers." Indeed, the
page about this incident at Massachusetts MUFON (Mutual UFO Network) relates
that Alpert saw "four brilliant lights in the sky."
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