“If you can’t stomach the gore, don’t run the photo. Period,” wrote Orange County Register Editor Charles Apple, who first brought attention to The Daily News’ photoshopping.

The Daily News declined to comment on its editorial decision, but the question of whether to publish graphic images is one many other editors confront.

FOR GORE

Some advocate for the publication of graphic photos, arguing that text can never show the true magnitude of a horror as visuals do.

“I think TV news distances and ‘shrink-wraps’ human suffering,” writes Zeynep Tufekci, a fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy. “[A]nd I believe such mode of reporting is against the public interest.”

The paywall, set to take effect this summer, will allow each visitor 20 complementary page views per month, excluding the home page and classifieds section. The newspaper hopes to maintain most of its 17 million monthly unique visitors.

Such a metered model has proven successful for other newspapers including The New York Times, which Columbia Journalism Review said generates $100 million through digital subscriptions.

In addition to not counting clicks from search engines and social media, the paywall will allow unlimited access from schools, government and military workplaces, notable as more than 20 percent of District of Columbia residents are federal employees, according to Forbes. But Don Graham, chairman and CEO of The Washington Post Co., has previously noted that locals provide less than 10 percent of the newspaper’s online traffic. This statistic made him previously wary of charging for online access, as he predicted that bundling digital subscriptions with print wouldn’t be as successful for The Post as for other papers.

Bill Keller, former executive editor of The New York Times wrote earlier this month about the importance of journalists being there when news happens. Risk-averse, cost-focused news organizations had begun their retreat from the world long ago, Keller wrote, lamenting that the truly committed foreign correspondent was something of an endangered species.

Sadly, in many areas, this issue goes far beyond a diminished corps of foreign correspondents.

The truly committed journalist, who is prepared to make personal sacrifices to tell the story despite economic, social and political obstacles, is in some societies also under threat. And how many publishers are still hiring and training and deploying journalists who are able to make their own calls on how close they get to risky situations?

So when exceptions arise, they are worth making a fuss about. Two Africans who understand the need to be there were in Zambia this week to share their newspaper experiences with participants on WAN-IFRA’s Women in News programme.

‘Post-truth politics’. The expression has an undeniable ring to it. Fusing a modish anti-politics sentiment with pleasingly Orwellian overtones, the phrase has come to symbolize the pessimism and contempt that has permeated much of the media commentary during the lead-up to today’s Presidential election. Orwell himself said that in times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act; whether or not the 2012 campaign ought to be castigated as being especially mendacious, the central role of websites such as FactCheck and PolitiFact suggests an urge to scythe through the dense undergrowth of shrill partisanship in search of something that is empirically, verifiably, irreducibly ‘true’.