People love photos.
No, they really, really love photos.
Don’t believe me? Check out flickr, webshots or even facebook. The digital revolution has allowed everyone to cheaply take and share photos. People absolutely love photos.
68% Respondents to a survey I commissioned for my 2006 award-winning honors thesis on the impact of the Web on newspaper said they found photo galleries appealing or very appealing. Video, often thought of as the new media wunderkind, was found to be appealing or very appealing by 51% of respondents.
It should be noted my survey was of college students only. So, any suggestion that video will become more popular as younger audiences age is probably false. Video is important moving forward, but not before papers utilize photos like they should be.
Photos continued to get ignored, while everyone is pushing video. Newspapers already take some of the best photos anywhere, now they just need to harness them. If you take dozens of photos (or hundreds of thousands) with every story, why do you usually only put one photo online with each story?
Put as many good and relevant photos as you have online. In fact, I often see less photos online. This doesn’t mean you have to be creating photo galleries left and right, but it does mean more photos should be attached to stories.
This is how I would harness photos better.
1. Attach more photos to stories
If I have five good shots from an event, I’ll use them all. There is no need for me to just stick one shot per story.
2. Develop a system that allows for easy creation of non-Flash photo galleries
Every time you have more than a few photos doesn’t mean you need to bust out Flash. It makes sense to have your Web site automatically create a photo gallery once you upload more than a certain number of photos. A simple Ajax gallery would work well and would allow for an easy way to create smaller photo galleries.
This system should require no technical work by those uploading the photos.
3. More photo essays with Flash (or Ajax)
This is for the bigger galleries, when you have a lot of really good photos. It is probably more along the lines of a photo essay. These are the kinds of galleries that stand on their own, where the previous ones go with a story. Most newspapers need to do more of these.
Maybe it means doing a photo essay a day, or doing one whenever you have a big story. Maybe it means doing a gallery for the best photos of the week. Think outside the box and do something exciting.
4. Tag photos.
I don’t care about your legacy systems or how everything is built around your print operations. Those are excuses.
What I do care about is delivering content and technology that users want. Because ultimately it is the users that matter. They want a better way to consume and find photos.
So, tag your photos! Every photo doesn’t need a caption, especially if you post a gallery with 100 shots from a local football game (Users will eat this up. Trust me, your print instincts are wrong on this). I’m not going to read 100 captions, but every photo should be tagged. Every player in the shot tagged, all the teams, the event, etc.
If the photo gallery between West High and East High is tagged with both schools’ names, the date they played and who is in all the photos, that’s all I really need to know. There will be a full-fledged story with the game anyway. I don’t need a novel with each photo.
Tagging makes a lot more sense than just relying on captions. When I look at photos on facebook, most don’t have captions, but they are tagged. I know the event, I know the people in them and I usually know when it happens. That’s all I usually need to know.
Remember photo galleries and photo essays aren’t the same thing.
But tagging is so much more than that. If something is tagged, it is incredibly searchable. The searchability of photos on most Web sites is alarmingly bad.
People would get fired if stories were that unsearchable. Tag your photos, now.
5. User photos.
User-generated content is here to stay, but it needs to be utilized correctly. The easiest and best way to harness it is through photos. Maybe you didn’t get shots of that local carnival but your readers did. Soliciting their photos will get them both involved and get you content. What more could you ask for?
Relevant photo galleries from users are also popular. In my honors thesis, I noted The Morning Call had photo galleries from users that were 66% as popular as staff galleries. That’s really good when you consider the content is free.
Newspapers take great photos. They need to start utilizing them and technology better. Don’t talk to me about video unless you have already hit a home run with your photos.
Let’s start showing photos the love they deserve.
