|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|||||||||
|
|
|
||||||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|||||||||
|
IT WASN'T JUST ANOTHER RIBBON CUTTING I was in the Scan Room, scanning the one shot that I had made for our Business Section when Karen came in to scan her film. I’ve known Karen Wiles Stabile for a long time. She came to Newsday as a kid in her 3rd year of college. She was one of our summer interns. And she was good enough to be hired as a staff photographer when she finished college. She was (and still is) a pretty gal, with a Texas drawl right out of central casting. She has lived on Long Island for...oh God, probably 30 years now, but she never lost that drawl. She takes a lot of ribbing from us natives but she endures it with grace and good humor. Anyway, she started telling us about an assignment that she had today. Karen lives in Garden City which is close enough to the city line (NY City, that is. You have to understand that NY City isn’t just Manhattan, with the Empire State Building and Times Square. It is also, Staten Island, the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens. Brooklyn and Queens are geographically part of Long Island. And Newsday prints a Queens Edition.) Karen lives close enough to Queens to draw an occasional assignment for the Queens edition, which has their own staff. Today she was to photograph a ribbon cutting to commemorate the re-opening of a refurbished neighborhood park. She got there early and the presence of a number of NY City Police Cars didn’t strike her as unusual, because there is usually a police presence at a public gathering where NY City officials are in attendance. What did strike her as unusual was the fact that while there did seem to be a number of official looking people in the park, there didn’t seem to be many of the public in attendance. There were some still and tv cameras shooting as she drove up and she assumed that the tv types were shooting “B” Roll footage before the official event took place. Karen parked her car and grabbed her cameras out of the trunk and walked up to the park entrance. That’s when she noticed something really different. Instead of the usual pink or blue satin ribbon that is usually strung across the soon to be opened entrance this was yellow plastic and emblazoned across the full length of the bright yellow plastic tape was the warning, “CRIME SCENE. DO NOT CROSS. N.Y. CITY POLICE DEPT.” Hmmm. Kinda makes you stop and think that maybe this isn’t your usual ribbon cutting. It seems as though the body of a dead woman who had been shot had been discovered in the park. The photographers who were already on the scene had responded to police reports on their scanners about a homicide and were there to cover a breaking news story. Not a piece of fluff about the re-opening of a park. Other media types began to arrive, expecting the usual dog and pony show involving a bunch of local politicians posing with an oversized pair of scissors to cut a satin ribbon. Just like Karen, they were now confronted with an entirely different situation. I suppose it is to our credit as newspukes, that we can shift gears on the spot and go into a “Spot News” mode and do the job. That's what newspukes do. Way to go, Karen.
Photo by Karen Wiles Stabile ©1999 Newsday |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Dick
Kraus
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Contributor
since 1998
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Behind
the Viewfinder - A Year in the Life of Photojournalism |
