Wow, it even has the same image as our article (
Qantas Increases Cost of Emirates Reward Flights) which was published 2.5 hours earlier! I don't think it's a coincidence.
@DavidFlynn, care to acknowledge your source this time?
Hi Matt, and thanks for offering me the chance to share my side of this. You may not like my answer to this, but here goes.
First up: the Executive Traveller article was published around 6.30pm yesterday (see
), so I don't know about it being published "2.5 hours" after the AFF article because I didn't even see the AFF home page article on this until you linked to it. See later for an explanation on how we select images and why yes, this
was a coincidence.
Source: Executive Traveller's 'source' was a reader who emailed us about this change and pointed to the partner table on the Qantas website. The reader did not mention or link to AFF, and we did not learn about this via AFF.
So, that's your first concern addressed.
Now the
reader may well have learned of this from this thread, but he may also have picked it up elsewhere - some other source, word of mouth, who knows – he may even have been looking to make his own EK booking using QF points. The point is, a
reader tipped us off to the change and pointed us to the QF partner table, and we took it from there and did our own legwork to pull the article together. Again: a reader emails me, points to the QF website. There's Zero AFF in that.
I did ask Brandon (to whom I assigned the aricle) to quickly see if it had been picked up / covered anywhere else, as this is 'standard procedure' for some of the more niche 'news' articles, so I'd imagine he clicked through to this thread at some stage in that quick coverage check, and I
think I did likewise (was a super-busy day yesterday, as they all are of late, so recollection is not 100%)... but that doesn't make AFF a 'source' in any way, it's just a quick check on a story's newsiness which sometimes also determines its priority in the queue. As you'll see from Brandon's article, he did all his own legwork on this plus a statement (arrived this morning) from QF PR.
As to the image: really? Credit me with better judgement than to use the same image even if AFF was the source! But as it happens, the image we used is a standard EK PR-supplied image, it's one which sits in our library and one we have used many times before, and we chose it for the same reasons you probably did. So yeah, total concidence.
Here's some background: we have a number of standard 'go-to' EK PR images which we try to rotate through. How do we choose which image to run? For starters and for a flight- or cabin-centric story , I generally aim to get a shot that's business class (unless the story leans very much towards F) and which includes a person (many aviation sites just run pics of planes, which for me is almost a last resort). We have some pics of passengers in EK J seats but the images are not immediately recogniseable as EJ to the mainstream reader, and that's a goodly chunk of the audience, hence why the presence of cabin crew works in this instance. And I could have used a shot of just EK cabin crew, or crew in front of a plane, but this is about booking a seat, and so the seat is for me a key part of choosing a suitable image. Join those dots and you can see why we chose the pic we did – and again, I imagine you chose it for much the same reason.
That might be more info that you desired but it's a window into the process by which I and many other editors and writers select photos – it's a selection process which takes but seconds in real time, and it's the process through which this pic was chosen. Hell, as mentioned earlier, I didn't even
know AFF had used this image on any home page story until you mentioned it.
Thanks for the chance to explain this, and while I suspect some may choose not accept that explanation, that's not on me.
www.executivetraveller.com
