Exciting moment, dull photo

It's estimated 2,000 journalists recorded the rescue of the Chilean miners trapped for many, many weeks underground. 2,000!

Yet, many Internet sites because of copyright laws turned to the official Flickr stream created by the Chilean government for images. My local paper did this. All the B front images were courtesy of the Government of Chile via Reuters.

The Photo Galleries on the paper's Internet site features a number of fine shots taken by Cesar Illiano and Terry Wade of Reuters. Space limitations and time may have been responsible for limiting the play given these pictures to just the paper's Internet site.

Since my local paper had lots of powerful images available, why did they plaster a fuzzy, frame grab, complete with screen scan lines, across their front page? (It is just a guess, but possibly the best images were not available at the time that the front page had to be released to the backshop. This is one of the big weaknesses of the traditional printed daily newspaper.)

A video framegrab fills the front page of The London Free Press, a Sun Media paper.

Credit: Hugo Infante and the Government of Chile