For those struggling with forumspeak! SOOC = straight out of camera = jpg(basically)

some news that Reuters have recently announced that they want freelance photographers to send in SOOC jpgs to the office, and not images converted from raw files.

That is, not that they don't want the raw file, but they don't want jpg files that have been 'shopped' from any other files.
I'm guessing that they want to see in the exif the software to be that of the camera!

Noble in it's basic principle .. but an exercise in futility as a reality I think.

What I'm thinking is that Reuters are getting tired of receiving some questionable looking material from over artistically inclined, current generation freelancers who's notion of reality is the current most popular Instagram filter!

So Reuter's new directive is almost certainly aimed to minimise this artistic bent and attempt to eliminate any distortion of reality in the images they receive.
The idea is perfectly understandable .. honourable and even desired. At least it should be desired, as I prefer my news uncooked, unbaked, unprocessed and not mired by someone else's idea of what it should have looked like.
For news images, I prefer the plain jane boring looking images.
Now, my thoughts are off on unrelated tangents if I see an image presented as news if that images looks overly fantastic!
That is, if the image of the news article looks in any way 'shopped', I generally stop thinking of the news in the article, and my thoughts are off on the topic of the image itself .. either that it's nicely done(but I don't like the idea that it's 'done' at all), or that the person presenting the piece is trying to hide something by presenting such a well processed image.

Note that this is only for news images relating to some news article! For artistic images(or general photography) I don't mind much either way. But news is news and it should be about the news .. and not someone's point of view!

Anyhow ... back onto the topic of why the effort is futile!
Exif data is easily manipulated to reflect whatever the photographer wants in the image metadata!
I can't understand why the so called powers that be at Reuters can't understand that.

Eg. I have an image saved either SOOC, or converted to jpg by my preferred Nikon software. If I need to tweak that image, say just to compress it a tad more to fit within the 250Kb limit, I find that the best program to do that is FSViewer. (I used to use other image resizers, but now find FSV the best way).
But what FSViewer does, is to resize the image as you need .. hence is manipulating the image in a fairly complicated manner .. yet when you save the image, in the metadata the software used to create the jpg image is still the originating software! .. ie. not FSViewer.

Exiftool is a program that can manipulate the exif/metadata to the point of impossibility(if you care).

From my (very basic) understanding of metadata/exif manipulation, while you can see that metadata may have been altered in some way .. the problem is that you don't know from what original source!

Personally, I think they've gone the wrong way, and should be asking for raw files instead!
Once again, my (basic) understanding of raw files is that they can't be altered enough to hide some surreptitious secret sauce!

Alternatively! .. an even more simple idea is would be:
If those reporters are submitting any questionable images as news material and any images are found to have been 'shopped' to an extent considered a wee bit too artistic .. then ban that reporter/freelancer!