Media & PR

£50 for a charity of your choice

Here’s the simple challenge, with £50 to charity of your choice on offer to the first person.

Find me a story in a mainstream media outlet about exam results in the UK this year.

Oh, and it has to have at least one photo.

Oh, and the photo(s) have to be of photogenic boys, not girls.

After all, there are plenty of such stories illustrated just with photos of girls, so there’s bound to be plenty that’s just illustrated with boys, isn’t there?

Tally ho etc.

29 responses to “£50 for a charity of your choice”

  1. Jamie: not really a story about exam results.

    David: I’ll be harsh and say know. Had he been smiling…

    Dave: so close, but there’s a woman in the photo…

    Anthony: ooh, sneeky – but it is indeed a male hand by the looks of it. So name a charity…

  2. @Kim however, it is a write up about what happened a year after he got his results – so photo may well be from last year as well (interesting the journalist is female).

  3. That photo’s terribly small. But, squinting a lot, I think I can declare that all the boys are photogenic.
    If only the pic was a lot bigger… But so far that’s the winner.

  4. Mark: I think that’s only Wikipedia’s definition. It’s a pretty subjective term. My problem with it is that you seem to be suggesting that photogenic boys would be OK. Either you think ‘the media’ should use nice-looking people to illustrate stories or you don’t. I can’t work out which.

  5. Jeremy: ah, in that case that’s because you’re looking for the wrong thing in my post. It’s about the media’s gender choices when it comes to photos at exam time rather than any of the many other issues around media choices and clichés.

  6. I wasn’t ‘looking for’ anything. I just think this whole debate is flawed. If you’re looking for cliches you’ll find them, that’s the nature of cliches. The fact is, there *are* pictures of boys too, as the above posts demonstrate, you’re just ignoring them because they don’t fit in with the argument. So who’s won the £50?

  7. Jeremy: I’m not ignoring them, but making the point how rare they are. In fact, the Guardian today used a photo of four boys – but blogged in jest about how it was making media history in doing so, illustrating how they too recognise that the gender balance of photos doesn’t reflect the gender balance of those taking or passing the exams.

    As for winner – see my comment near top of the thread.

  8. Media show imbalance in gender choice of pictures – next thing they’ll be putting photos of topless girls in the papers for blokes to gawp at.

    But thanks for the debate. I guess I’m just a bit grumpy and taking it all too seriously – and sorry I didn’t spot the winner earlier. My fault.

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