Any number of items in the newspaper can provoke accusations of bias, unrestrained liberalism and sensationalism. Word choices, story choices, columnists, quotes, headlines, even advertisements can mean a day of terse e-mails and telephone calls. Last Monday's target was a set of photos illustrating the story "Thousands Protest Civil Unions."

The package consisted of a small photo of people attending a rally protesting civil unions and much larger photo of a mock wedding of two women at a gathering in support of same-sex marriages. Both rallies took place at the state Capitol last Sunday. The problem for those who called and e-mailed Monday: the rally that drew the least number of people was the largest image on the front page. According to police estimates, 80 came out for the same-sex marriage rally compared with 3,000 protesting civil unions.

Photo Director John Scanlan explained that when it comes to visuals, size isn't everything.

"I thought both photos paired well together on the page and worked well with the headline and the story," Scanlan said. "It isn't the job of news photographs to simply support the point of the story, although more often than not they do. But photographs also communicate and can add other information and offer a point of view that is different from the story. ...The decision on which photographs to use with a story is a somewhat complicated decision involving news judgment and aesthetic judgment. In this case, the more interesting and compelling photograph was the larger one. It was `active,' less static then the smaller image. It also needed a certain size to be `read' properly. The smaller photo was easier to read at a smaller size than the larger photo would have been. And although the larger photo was from the smaller rally, it was determined to be `the better' photo.

"If we were to choose [lead] photos based solely on news judgment, we would often have a visually boring page. What makes a good story doesn't always make a good photograph. All stories aren't in pyramid style, with the facts presented in the order of importance. We try to engage readers, not just throw facts at them. We try to do the same thing with photographs."

The layout worked well visually. It attracted readers to the story. And I agree that photos serve more than a supporting role to news stories. More often than not they are the power of an engaging page, which makes it all the more important that they reflect the news. Some might even argue that the same-sex marriage rally was the more newsworthy image, but the numbers argued differently. In this case, leading the newspaper with the best photo wasn't enough. The decision left readers questioning the newspaper's motives and left some on the news staff asking if it's more important to win design awards or to provide fair and balanced news.