Think of a reporter. Odds are you’ve just pictured someone in a trench coat, standing among a gaggle of other journalists furiously taking notes and shouting questions to a politician or a criminal or a lawyer walking down the courthouse steps.
Whatever you saw when you thought of a reporter, you didn’t just think of words. You had an image in your mind, a mental photograph.
Which proves a certain point. Journalism is about telling the truth, about bringing news to people without bias or filter. With such lofty goals, words will always fail us. But a photograph can capture the world exactly as you see it.
At the Daily, we have a photo department whose student employees work day and night to capture the important moments of campus life for the paper you read each morning.
The pictures they take are more than mere art. Many, in fact, aren’t very pretty. The photos you see in the Daily tell stories. They bring actual events to you without the filter of words or the biases of a writer.
What words could do justice to the scene on the right — steam rising from a cappuccino machine as a student starts the day behind the counter of a coffee shop? Only that picture, at that instant, could capture what it was like to experience that moment of time.
The theme of this finals issue is “The Big Picture.” Within these pages you’ll find many of the best photographs the Daily published in the last year. Some have won awards, such as the picture below, of schoolchildren at the University’s Brain Awareness Week, which won the best feature award from the Society of Professional Journalists in regional competition.
Other photos in this issue never made it into the Daily, often because there’s just never enough room for all the pictures we’d like to run.
And not every picture is a photograph. Some of departing editorial cartoonist Jon Nilsen’s best work also appears in these pages. Finally, we’ve asked many of our reporters to talk about the stories that led to the pictures you’ll see in this issue. They’ll show you how they translate the moments they see into the words you read every day.