Results matching “online photo se”

In February 2008 the News & Star launched a photo gallery of regions criminals who have been sentenced to two or more years in prison.  Since then, the Banged Up gallery has become one of the sites most popular pages and has attracted more than 60,000 viewers a month.

The gallery has also been expanded to News & Star's sister site, the North-West Evening Mail.

Sun-Times News Group reports a deal with social media firm Pluck which will offer readers discussion forums blogs, photo and video sharing as well as other community tools on SunTimes.com, PioneerLocal.com, SuburbanChicagoNews.com, SouthtownStar.com and Post-Trib.com. The venture is meant to increase audience interactivity, according to Catherine Lanucha, the group's director of content.

Media outlets have taken the Games as an opportunity to compete for audiences as sites reveal an array of Olympics-focused features. Google announced a series of new tools that were launched for the Beijing Olympic Games this year, such as a virtual 3D tour of the stadiums that uses a combination of Google Maps and Google Earth.

Other features include an Olympics widget that can be downloaded and added to a personalized iGoogle site in order to receive features that provide Olympics coverage, sports headlines, YouTube videos, daily horoscopes, weather forecasts and a Google News feature. Users may also add applications such as a clock or games, similar to those used on social networks like Facebook.
 

The New York Times has a prominent section on the homepage that provides stories, results, schedules, multimedia and an interactive Olympics Tracker that allows you to personalize.

USA Today has a colourful section on the Games, offering everything from stories and results to blogs and Twitter feeds. There is also an "Olympics: Looking back and ahead" section that discusses former games and upcoming games as well as a section with input from fans.

The New Zealand Herald's Olympics coverage entails a section that is easy to navigate, with features like "As our Olympic team a question" and "Weird Olympics" with unusual stories about the events (e.g. stories like "Spanish team defends 'slanted-eye' photo", "China opts for lip-synching in quest for perfect Olympic image").

Numerous newspapers around the globe have launched sites dedicated entirely to the Games, such as Russian gazeta.ru, Irish Independent.ie and Ecuadorian eltelegrafo.com.

Send us examples of your Olympics coverage.

Source: The Telegraph
 

According to photographer Maggie Steber, former director of photography at The Miami Herald, the problem with newspapers, especially in the US, is that photojournalists think in a manner that is "formatted and formulaic", which may not correspond to today's world. The answer may be to use strong imagery to help newspapers that may be struggling.

"We live in a visual culture, audiences are sophisticated, and images can be more complicated, less traditional. Photography has changed, progressed, explored. Newspaper photography has not kept pace. Evocative, telling, forceful images can help prolong the life of newspapers, both print and online," said Steber.

She mentioned that numerous papers use photos that are "banal" and "repetitive", encouraging photojournalists to be "brave" and "smart".
 
She pointed out that agreement between designers, art directors and photographers is important and that brainstorming involving the photographer or photo editor should be a habitual newsroom activity.

Source: Garcia Media through IFRA Executive News Service
 

The Times-News website www.blueridgenow.com is the 13th website to be redesigned in the New York Times Regional Media Group (NYTRMG) revamp project. The new-look website was relaunched on Tuesday.

Times-News online director Matt Rehm said, "the primary benefit of the new site is that it loads faster, also, it was built on a more flexible platform that will allow us to present content like videos and photo galleries in new ways".

The redesign of the website comes with the standardization project called I15. The NYTRMG is composed of 16 newspapers with 16 differently designed websites in 16 different structures.

This harmonization gives them more efficiency with new features and updates. 14 websites have been redesigned in 21 weeks according to Michael Schlein, director of product and technology for NYTRMG.

The I15 redesign provides the group with a new platform which can be updated and improved at any time.

Source: Blueridgenow.com

Google News is testing a new design; the search engine is experimenting with a visually-rich design that shows images, videos, quotes, and popular stories.

There new design also contains a "featured photo" section that utilises images from AFP, The Associated Press, and Reuters. This is the first time Google News has promoted stories just because it has the permission to show associated images. The new interface personalises all the content.



In June, Google News blog announced: "Over the course of the next few weeks, you may notice a few changes to Google News... or maybe not. You see, we'll be running some experiments on the look and feel of our site, based on an accumulation of user research and feedback, as well as the evolving state of online journalism."

Source: Cyberjournalist.net and Google

Adding to the growing list of news outlets that use mobile platforms including the Associated Press, the New York Times (NYT) launched an iPhone application that it developed with Atimi, available for purchase at the iPhone App Store.

"Our new NYTimes iPhone application provides readers with an even richer, more personalized experience and greater access to our high-quality journalism whether they are on or offline," said Vivian Schiller, NYT.com's senior vice president and general manager.

The application has:
-Offline reading (by synching via Wi-Fi or phone network and downloading news).
-Simple navigation
-Customization options (select sections for one-touch access)
-Ability to views news in photo view
-Fixed ads that are click-through when online and remain as a display when offline

Source: Finanz Nachrichten through IFRA Executive News Service

See also:
AP launches native iPhone application

What happens when the image is the story? When you pick a story to pull from the image - rather than sort through a photo file to find one fitting the story?

It sounds, "exactly upside down," which is exactly how Brian Storm, founder of 2005 start-up MediaStorm, describes their business model for the production and distribution of photojournalism.

"They take still images, motion-picture and video footage, and audio tape, seek out the best story within that material, and then create a narrative through cutting and editing, adding voices and music," reports the Wall Street Journal. "[It's] something like a documentary movie, a TV segment, a book that talks, or a magazine article that moves."

The multi-media production company, which gets images from individual photographers as well as archives and partners like the National Geographic Society and Reuters, has proved highly successful. Of the 22 stories available on their website, many are award-winning. Among others, "Bearing Witness: Five Years of the Iraq War" and "Katrina: An Unnatural Disaster" have received numerous accolades from the news community.

"MediaStorm's stories are not predictable; none of them preach. In this way, its aesthetic is very old fashioned, mainstream, almost apolitical," said Mary Panzer, of the Wall Street Journal.

In addition to production, MediaStorm also offers workshops to train journalists in multi-media techniques, equipment and software.

Source: Wall Street Journal

The Los Angeles Times' website drew 115 million page views in June, just short of its all-time traffic record of 120 million PV set in May.

A quick glance at the list of most-read stories and most-viewed multimedia features in June gives a good idea of readers' favorite topics of interest - namely a push towards celebrity news and away from global issues and traditionally important topics such as the general elections. The lists also show that, despite newspapers' widespread emphasis on blogs and videos, these platforms still account for a minimal share of total traffic.

Furthermore, these lists provide some indications about how reader interests may vary from one platform to the other (news, blogs, videos, picture galleries).

If one supposes that latimes.com readership isn't too significantly different from average online newspaper readership, then these numbers hint toward which formats work best for different topics (Skip to 'Insights' for a brief summary).

Text - Top articles:

1. Alex Kozinski suspends L.A. obscenity trial after conceding his website had sexual images (Scott Glover)
2. Mega-mansions are L.A.'s really big show (Jessica Garrison)
3. Oliver Stone and 'W.,' a story of President Bush (John Horn)
4. Fourth day of triple digits sends crowds to L.A. pools, beaches  (Tami Abdollah)
5. Packing in public: Gun owners tired of hiding their weapons embrace 'open carry' (Nicholas Riccardi)
6. Envisioning a world of $200-a-barrel oil (Martin Zimmerman)
7. Judge orders TMZ to remove sex tape of actor Verne Troyer (Harriet Ryan)
8. Lakers have a collapse for the ages (Mike Bresnahan)
9. Offshore oil drilling opponents are rethinking (Richard Simon and Bob Drogin)
10. Obama leads in battle for Latino vote (Peter Wallsten)


The first thing that strikes us when looking at the list is how few stories relate to 'global' issues or to the general elections in the US: ranked 6 is a column about rising oil prices and the only story directly related to the elections is ranked 10. The majority of stories have mostly local relevance about Los Angeles.

(Only) one of the top 10 stories concerns sports - a usually strong section for most newspaper websites although June isn't the biggest season for sports in the US - and the Lakers' basketball team's demise in the championship finals.

The top three stories (and 7) revolve, more or less closely, around issues of sex and the cult of celebrities and entertainment. Number 3 is a story about the making-of Oliver Stone's latest movie about President George W. Bush. Granted, considering Los Angeles' prime location in the movie and celebrity industry, it isn't particularly surprising that many latimes.com readers are going for those stories.

But this doesn't necessarily mean that readers of latimes.com news articles prefer 'softer' content compared to readers of other online newspapers. In fact, this distribution is probably representative of a move towards celebrity news by mainstream media and the audience in general.

Limitations: This is a very cursive overview of readers' favorite topics for news stories only looking at the top 10. A more in-depth study would possibly show that while a few select individual stories about sex and celebrities receive many hits, the sections for 'hard' news (World, Business, National) on the whole generate substantially more traffic than Entertainment.

Top blogs:

1. Top of the Ticket  -- 1,743,178 PV
2. The Dish Rag  -- 1,437,462 PV
3. L.A. Land --  652,605 PV
4. Lakers Blog      
5. Show Tracker                
6. L.A. Now         
7. Technology Blog (first month out, and in the top ten)       
8. Gold Derby      
9. Web Scout      
10. Countdown to Crawford (launched June 17)


Now a look at the top-10 list of blogs gives a more intricate perspective: compared to news stories, the blog format seems to draw more readers to 'serious' topics such as politics and the general elections.

The political blog Top of the Ticket is in the lead, and Countdown to Crawford (a blog that covers the final steps of the elections) has made it to the list although it was only launched in mid-June. Ranked 6, L.A. Now covers general news about California.

It may seem counter-intuitive that readers prefer the blog format, usually associated with a more conversational tone and less formality, to read stories about politics. On the other hand, this preference could also be explained by the fact that those readers precisely prefer a format open to opinion and debate to read about those topics. Since blogs typically allow for more author disclosure, they can also be seen as a more transparent medium.

The last two blogs revolve around technology and developments in the digital landscape, a thematic that was absent from the Top 10 news stories.

Limitations: Again, this is hardly a scientific procedure, and the top 10 blogs on latimes.com account for less than 5% of total page views on the site. To put this in further perspective, five of the ten blogs relate to 'softer' content - three revolve around celebrities and the movie industry - one is about the Lakers and number 3 is a blog about real estate (note the parallel with the news story about mansions ranking 2).

Furthermore, The Dish Rag, ranked 2, is edging close to Top of the Ticket, so that in reality the number of users consulting LA Times blogs for soft and hard news is probably equivalent.

Pictures - Top photo galleries:

1.  Celebrity and sports collide in L.A.
2.  Universal Studios fire
3.  Celebrities' real names revealed (Denise Martin and Stephanie Lysaght)
4.  Hollywood hunks before they were hot (Elizabeth Snead)
5.  Celebrities by The Times
6.  Celebrity shots
7.  Midwest flooding
8.  Top 9 cars women buy more than men
9.  Hollywood's unwedded bliss list (Elizabeth Snead)
10. R-rated firsts (Susan King)

Unsurprisingly, the list of most popular photo galleries is also dominated by celebrities, even more so than for news stories or blogs (seven out of ten).

Of the three remaining picture galleries, two are big general news stories with obviously strong visual content: ranked 2 is the Universal Studios fire and ranked 7 is a gallery about floods in the Midwest.

Video - Top videos:

1. Dogs orphaned in China's quake find a home - 132,239 streams - AP
2. LAPD goes green: Maya Sanchez reports - 112,375 streams - KTLA
3. Tsvangirai on Mugabe - AP
4. Local update: Moe the chimp escapes cage -  KTLA
5. Amanda Beard heads to Omaha for her fourth Olympic swim - LAT
6. 17-year-old decapitated by Six Flags ride - AP
7. Australia marks Iraq withdraw with parade - AP
8. Evening update: USC student sentenced to time served in baby's death - KTLA
9. Fires grip parts of California - AP
10. Bush pleased with war spending bill - AP

The top-10 list for videos also delivers its share of lessons. First of all, despite newspapers' wild rush to boost video content, videos generate a limited amount of traffic compared to most text stories.

Many of the videos in the list are 'soft', but don't relate to entertainment especially. Instead, they are often emotionally-driven (dogs orphaned in China, 17-year old girl decapitated at a fair park). A lot of these popular videos are visual anecdotes with a potential for virality (Moe the chimp escapes cage).

'Hard' news, ie. a Congress debate about legislation or a business acquisition, does not typically constitute a popular pick for videos, as it is often poor visually.

The majority of successful video content is syndicated, generally provided by the Associated Press (only one of the top 10 videos was produced by the LA Times). Considering the average PVs for videos, and although CPMs for video ads are usually higher than for regular PVs, it is still often (too) costly for newspapers to produce their own quality videos.

Insights

In short, here are some of the insights brought by latimes.com's Top-10 lists:

- The Los Angeles Times has strongly emphasized 'soft' news, which is becoming increasingly popular among regular news stories.
- On the other hand, its blogs seem to attract many viewers interested by politics - although half of the blogs in the list deal with lighter content.
- The blog format is also popular when they deal with technological issues.
- To an extent, it could be inferred that the latimes.com is fulfilling its role as a newspaper by focusing on 'local' stories: Hollywood, celebrities and the entertainment industry being part of that local context.
- The photo galleries are overwhelmingly dominated by pictures of celebrities. The only two 'hard' news stories are obviously visual: a fire and floods.
- Video content must also be visually rich, but the most popular videos are those that are emotionally-driven and potentially viral (ie: humorous anecdotes, shocking stories).

The purpose of this piece was simply to make some observations as to the types of topics preferred by online users, depending on the format they were published in. The goal wasn't to quaintly warn editors against the risks of chasing eyeballs at the expense of news judgment.

However, these Top-10 lists are clearly representative of the trend, adopted both by editors and by the audience, towards more celebrity-type news, or 'soft' news in general. In January and April, when the Associated Press and the Los Angeles Times announced that they were beefing up coverage of Britney Spears, at the same time as newsrooms across the nation couldn't afford the expenses of covering the elections, many newspaper editors were outraged by this rush towards more catchy, entertainment-driven, stories.

According to others, celebrity is a cultural currency that fulfils a role in the press. But at what cost?

This week, the Omaha World-Herald - the largest employee-owned news publisher in the United States - will replace "production silos" with an integrated approach to production for its morning and evening print papers and www.omaha.com.

The Wolrd-Herald has selected Saxotech Mediaware Center to facilitate its integration for more than 200 staff members.

The Omaha paper is only the latest to integrate print and online production. Last month, the Guardian announced plans to integrate web and print; also in May, the LA Times created a new "Visual Journalism" department, to merge their print and web photo desks.

Source: Editor & Publisher

Since its launch on June 1 this year, the Boston Globe's Big Picture weblog has gotten worldwide acclamation. The site is simple, includes minimal advertising and maximal visual information.

The weblog's designer, programmer and writer Alan Taylor spoke to Waxy.org about the strategy and inspiration behind the site as well as his status as "a programmer in a journalist's world."

Essentially, the Big Picture features a patchwork of large-sized photographs and minimal text, focusing on the "visual storytelling" aspect of news stories. Being a developer, Taylor was able to do tasks like building templates and formatting styles himself and the site remains as his side project.

The first thing the Globe took care of was the legal aspect of using larger-than-usual photographs. Taylor mentioned that they could not find anything in the contracts that might have prohibited that.

"The general rule appears to be (my understanding of it) that the images should not be easily reproduced in print. Big Picture images max out at 990 pixels wide at 72dpi. If you scale that up to print resolution of 300dpi, you get an image that's only about 2 inches wide, so we'd appear to be within that limit," Taylor said.

When it comes to choosing stories, Taylor searches for stories and tries "to stock up for a rainy day too" by having "stored searches, some favorite photographers, some perpetually interesting subjects."

Taylor's Browsing and Posting technique:

"I use Firefox to browse the wire on an internal site, wired up with Greasemonkey scripts to give me decent-sized thumbs, extract caption and photo ID from the IMG tags. When I find an image I like, I save it to a local folder until I get about 25 or so good ones to choose from. Then I open all 25 in Photoshop, arrange the windows in a horizontal tile and drag them around to get a rough ordering that makes sense. Then I start to edit out images that don't make the cut, run a couple of recorded Photoshop Actions to size the images, and do some hand-cropping if necessary.

I also wrote a Photoshop script in Javascript that will grab all the images in a given folder and generate HTML with proper heights and widths for the images -- that's what I use as the body of the entry. Then I paste in captions (with some editing), grab some relevant links, write a short intro and post it."

Each entry takes him about two to three hours of work and he recently minimized the number of postings to three per week instead of one per weekday.

The Big Picture's width is achieved by taking the classic 1024-pixel-wide screen and taking out 34 pixels; so that it covers the majority of browser's scrollbars without using horizontal scrollbars.

Taylor points out that even though the Big Picture is not so well-linked to the main site, "they are still working on the relationship between articles written for the Globe that are online, and content that is produced for our online property only."

News articles usually use smaller photographs and according to Taylor, photo sites that have feature photographs seem to be missing "context, depth, story." He praises msnbc.com and the Washington Post, when it comes to the use of more photographs and less links to news stories. When Taylor links to news stories, he usually tries to stick to the New York Times family but he said that if the links are good he will use them from anywhere.
 
Taylor said that even if there is a question of bandwidth, "1024 pixel screen sizes are more prevalent, more people have faster connections" and that just as much quality could be obtained from still image as from a video.

Although web programmers might have bigger salaries than journalists, Taylor thinks that is changing. There is a question of how to make journalism positions more appealing to programmers.  

Taylor said that so far, the response to the Big Picture has been "over-the-top positive" but that he hopes that the "photographers" get the credit as well. In the 20 days since it was started, the blog has gotten 1.5 million pageviews, 1,500 comments for 20 entries and international interest due to it's "visual nature", according to Taylor.

Source: Waxy.org through Journadism