Within hours of releasing HonestReporting UK's critique, Sky News removed the entire photo montage from it's coverage. In an email to one of our readers, executive producer Julian March wrote:
The picture gallery you saw is created by a tool which automatically pulls in agency photos with a pre-determined search term (in this case Gaza).
The captions to the photos make it clear the attack depicted is from October 4th, so not contemporaneous.
Having said that I acknowledge your concerns. On a story as sensitive as this we should have been stricter about the relevance of material we added as related content. So I have removed the picture gallery from the article.
Sky News isn't the only news service using tools to automatically generate this kind of content. Is Journalism 2.0 leaving us with editors asleep at the wheel while web sites run on auto-pilot?
