I’m just in a “stealing stuff from Charles Apple’s blog” mood this morning (is theft the second most sincere form of flattery?). Charles writes about photojournalism on the Web and expresses some concerns about what it’s evolving into. The post was spurred by a blog entry by freelance photojournalist Will Seberger, in which Seberger voices his dismay with the way photos are used to accompany stories on many information sites — small and often crappy — and wonders if we can find ways to lead with the photo for an online story more often. In his reaction, Charles also pointed out that some sites are now making the ads the dominant visual element on a story page, further displacing great photographs.

My thoughts on this:

Icon Images

I share the concerns about the use of icon images (random, crappy stock photos pulled from a free source to accompany a story). The example Charles and Will point to — the use of a picture of racing dogs to accompany a story about Kindle vs. iPod — is particularly egregious since the picture has nothing to do with the story, and really it won’t have taken that much effort to find images of the Kindle and iPod.

“Featuring” Photos Online

In my opinion, the Web presents more opportunities than print ever could for presenting great photographs — and good photojournalism — to a mass audience. Unlike a print photo spread, there is no limit on how many pictures you can throw into an online gallery, and while the inline size of photos in online articles is smaller, you can always link to full-screen versions of the pictures (and a computer screen is wider than most newspapers). And of course, there’s the ease-of-dissemination factor.

However, the Web environment features photos differently than the print environment does. In print, featuring something usually means making it the biggest element in a design. Online, working within the principles of good Web design and user-friendliness, that same approach doesn’t work as well. How often do you see photos within content page that are larger than around 500 pixels (the width of the content column of this blog)? Design concerns aside, there’s also the increased load time factor. Larger photos on a story slows down that page and can drive people away.

The goal, I think, should be more about how to get as many people as possible to look at a large version of the picture. Size does factor into it, but placement and presentation matter more. A well-placed, highly visible link to a pop-up, screen-width version of a photo might serve it better than simply placing a big picture at the top of a page.

Compartmentalized Consumption –> Compartmentalized Presentation

It’s my (completely unscientific) observation that people tend to compartmentalize their consumption much more online than in print. When you look at a print product, you can’t help but view it, at some point in the consumption process, in its entirety — photos, headlines, stories. Often that happens when you first see the product, and that connection between the various elements influences the way we perceive the product and whether we decide to take a closer look or not (therefore the interplay between the elements is a big emphasis). Online, the first time you see a story is usually in the form of a plain text link (increasingly more so thanks to RSS feeds). Therefore, there isn’t that strong link between the story and its accessories (such as the photos). You click on a link to a story to read the text of that story. You click a thumbnail or link that says “photo gallery” to see photos. You click on an embedded YouTube video to view video, etc. So leading a story with a large photo won’t necessarily get that story more reads, whereas a well-placed and intriguing headline or thumbnail would draw more clicks (the My Yahoo! frontpage does a pretty good job with this on a daily basis).

Just as consumption of media is compartmentalized, so should the presentation of it. Don’t worry so much about making a picture as big as possible on a story page. Instead, put that picture/pictures into a separate gallery, and focus on inducing people to click on the link to the gallery. In fact, given the degree of compartmentalization that I think occurs in online media consumption, I think you would be doing your photos an injustice if you only put them on the story page without breaking them out into a separate photo gallery, since there’s a good chance that people reading that page would overlook the photos since they are on that page to read the text. The separate photo gallery would also solve the load-time issue. People are willing to wait a few more seconds for a multimedia piece to load, but not for a story page.

Ads As the Dominant Element

As for making ads the dominant visual element on a page, I despise it for so many reasons. Obviously there’s the journalistic aversion to displacing editorial content for advertising. But from a user point of view, ads online are an annoyance, much more so than in print, and the compartmentalization that takes place with editorial content online is heightened even more with ads, as in people just ignore them. The ads in the examples that Charles showed would slow down the user the first couple times they see the design, and even after they’ve gotten used to it, the ads would still be annoying as you’re constantly forced to consciously move your eyeballs from the ad back to the editorial content (which I guess is the point), but never feeling inclined to click on the ads.