Photo galleries on news Web sites
Photo galleries tend to be popular with visitors to online news sites — so it’s common to see these featured at or near the top of the home page. Many local newspapers use wire photos — often ONLY wire photos — in these galleries. (I’m not sure that’s the best strategy, because I can go a lot of places today to see photos from Louisiana or from the Republican National Convention.)
My local newspaper, The Gainesville (Fla.) Sun, has a photo gallery featured on the top right corner of the home page (well, the top after two ads). It changes the photos very slowly — you click, and then you wait … and wait. Sometimes you wait 15 to 20 seconds for the next image to appear.
A lot of newspapers use a gallery player that works this way. It’s not that they intentionally made it slow — that’s just their back-end system, or the network itself. The main reason the gallery is slow is because it was deliberately designed to physically load a new Web page each time it shows you a new photo.
I understand that this brings more pageviews into the count, and that’s the goal. Inflate the pageviews — even artificially — and you can brag to your advertisers.
Because the gallery continues to attract more unique users than other parts of the Web site, the newspapers think it’s okay that the usability is poor. Everyone would enjoy the gallery more if it changed to the next photo more quickly. (In addition to getting rid of the useless extra page loads, there are several techniques to optimize page- and image-loading time.)
What we see here is an example of “good enough.” I think this “good enough” approach has contributed much to the decline and downfall of American newspapers.
It’s good enough to have a photo gallery that does not include any local photos. People look at it (good). Less work for your staff (good).
It’s good enough to have a photo gallery player that is ugly and/or slow. People still look at it (good).
It’s good enough to make some people frustrated enough to quit — and leave — because, apparently, some other people will wait patiently and keep on clicking. (Not me!)
What a smarter business mind would look at is this:
- We have a thing that’s pretty popular with our visitors.
- How can we make it better?
- How can we learn from this?
- How can we extend this idea to new areas?
- How can we extend our branding and use this to reinforce what makes us unique and vital to our audience?
The newspapers’ approach to business: How can we inflate the number of pageviews on this?
Note: A photo gallery is sans audio, in most cases. Often the photos are unrelated to one another. A great gallery player is The Week in Pictures from MSNBC.com. It’s fast. It’s easy and pleasant to use. It’s way better than good enough.
This is another example of how the Web raises the bar for everyone — I know how lousy most newspapers’ photo galleries are because I have this one as an example of how good an online photo gallery can be.
Update (12:17 p.m.): See related post by University of Georgia photojournalism instructor Mark Johnson.
you’ve been eavesdropping on my conversations again. the “good enough” philosophy and the page views obsession is killing quality and the incentive to innovate. i do think the LA times uses photo galleries effectively because they use the captions to create a narrative, rather than photos for photos’ sake.
September 4, 2008 at 12:32 pm@roberto – I’m in ur head, stealin’ all ur thots.
The L.A. Times does the dumb page-loading thing … but theirs is a lot faster than my local paper’s.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/photography/
September 4, 2008 at 1:13 pmGreat points Mindy!
September 4, 2008 at 3:42 pmMindy,
You’re right that a clunky interface can drive away online traffic. Ours is the same as LATimes, and although it could be faster, it usually works pretty fast. It’s not real pretty, though.
But you almost ran past the more important element — editing. We have been working on our photo galleries this year on http://www.orlandosentinel.com and have increased traffic significantly by editing more carefully and then watching how the users respond. For our photos of the day feature, we include staff photos and links in captions to stories or other galleries. The most significant decision is the edit of the promo photo, or “thumbnail”. It is sort of like a magazine cover, grabbing the user’s attention. I say that most galleries are an “impulse click” and you need the right photo to attract a user. With the right thumbnail, our photos of the day can draw more than 100,000 page views in a day.
It is also humbling to watch the site traffic as it responds to your edit. A photo you like because it is graphic or artsy could stop traffic cold while a camera phone photo of a tornado will light it up. It brings us closer to the idea of editing for our audience — something we might have strayed away from in the print realm in the recent past.
Tom
September 6, 2008 at 8:10 pmThanks, Tom. That’s a particularly fascinating fact abut the thumbnail! An “impulse click” indeed!
Some journalists scoff at editing for the audience, but it doesn’t have to mean fluff and baby animals, as your tornado example indicates.
September 6, 2008 at 11:18 pmIt’s sad when it takes more time to go through a flash photo gallery than to click and have to reload the entire page for the next picture like you must with Chicago Tribune photo galleries.
September 7, 2008 at 3:29 pmMindy;
William Randolph Hearst was once quoted as saying, “Give me a magazine cover with a beautiful girl, a dog, or a baby on it, and I’ll give you a magazine that sells.” A lot of that still holds true. The OMG news photo works for us as a thumbnail but so do photos of beautiful women and cute or weird animals. An albino alligator is always a winner.
It’s important to remember that the photos of the day is not all fluff but it’s also not fluff-free. We hope to edit in a full range of photos. And based on traffic, we do much better when we do over the variety.
Tom
September 8, 2008 at 10:21 amHey, Tom, I blogged about a fine example of that once — Journalism 101: Pictures sell news — in a case where a serious news story received lots of attention because of a magazine cover photo.
September 8, 2008 at 12:18 pmHere’s a slide show player I designed for The New York Times Syndicate: http://www.jutarnji.hr/svijet/americki_izbori
Click on the faded pic of McCain and Obama in the right column.
The goal here was to have smooth transitions, an uncluttered interface, ad space and a delivery system that doesn’t interfere with browsing of the rest of the site.
September 8, 2008 at 5:48 pm