Story Behind Go! Cover Photo of Kissing Interracial Couple

go_coverI wrote a story for Poynter Online this week about a Go! cover photo of an interracial couple and the racially charged comments it generated.

To find out more about the issue, I talked with editors at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, including Kurt Greenbaum, editor of social media, about how they handled the comments:

When you’re trying to foster a conversation about race, how do you choose whom to include and whom to exclude?

It’s a question that reporters and editors at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch have asked a lot since launching the paper’s ‘A Conversation about Race‘ blog in January, and one that generated quite a bit of attention last week.

In a ‘Conversation about Race’ blog post on Friday, Post-Dispatch reporter Doug Moore wrote about the controversy surrounding a photo of a interracial couple that appeared on the Post-Dispatch‘s weekly Go! magazine. The photo generated negative comments from readers, many of whom said they were disturbed that the paper would run such an image.

[Read on for a Q&A with Greenbaum ….]

Advertisement

Published by Mallary Tenore Tarpley

Mallary is a mom of two young kiddos -- Madelyn and Tucker. Mallary absolutely loves being a mom and often writes about the need to find harmony when juggling motherhood and work. Mallary is the Assistant Director of the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas at Austin, where she manages the Center's various programs related to distance learning, freedom of expression, and digital journalism. Previously, she was Executive Director of Images & Voices of Hope and Managing Editor of The Poynter Institute’s media news site, Poynter.org. Mallary grew up outside of Boston and graduated from Providence College in Rhode Island. In 2015, she received a certificate in nonprofit management from Duke University. She now lives in beautiful Austin, Texas, with her kids, husband Troy and cat Clara. She's working on a memoir, slowly but surely. You can reach her at mjtenore@gmail.com.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: