Thank you for those links! As a natural French speaker, I enjoyed reading the story. Here are few points according to me around that:
- If there's one rule in photojournalism is that you need to report as is, no modification accepted! For sure the two guys failed at it!
- I don’t blame Paris Match for having been fools by the trick. Maybe later they would put something into place to verify the authenticity of the contestants’ story.
- Although they invented the story, I think there is something interesting that they communicated anyway about the students’ situation in France; this is definitely not journalism, but may be noteworthy in terms of communication.
- They fully achieved what they were up to and for that, I raise my hat! They understood the system and they beat it from the system itself! Great!
- All the reactions this thing created, after the facts, kind of increase the justification for them having done it. The more we blame them, the more it increases the justification for it! LOL!
- Considering they are art students, you can hardly expect more from a student than the way these two students have thought outside of the box, communicated something strongly and provoked some reactions. I think it was a remarkable work. It wasn’t clear if it was a college work or not. If I were their teacher I would give them the highest score.
- I don't necessarily know if I would refer as a "formulaic" thing, but I like what this may reveal about how magazines may be set for certain kind of news and will filter everything to only get those ones. In the public, we are receiving biased information just by the editorial choices made! I’m sure we can apply this logic to other magazine, newspaper or media. How good/true is the information we receive?
- One thing I really got (a certain insight), as a photographer, is the influence of the photographer when taking the pictures. The choice of what to take, and not to take, is influencing the news, and probably as much as how is rendered the chosen ones. I kind of admit that by the end, the public is getting something, but how true it might be? With all the implications of all those people with each their own choices and interpretations of the facts, the public can only have a story about the facts and not the facts themselves! “The” thing I’m really getting now is that, even if it comes from the trustiest publisher and the story has been done as close as possible to the facts, it will be a story anyway!
- From that insight, I have a suggested idea for a project that can probably goes into a similar direction than the one of the two French students. Chose one event and report it into two totally different ways, either by the same “reporter” or different ones. At the end, tell which one is true? If you only try to do one report, how would you do it? Like one of the two approaches or following a third one? Which one is really the true news? Where’s the truth?
That are some of my thoughts!
Regards,
Francois