Image Conversations

Picture beats

28Dec09

NYT Arts Beat Blog presents a weekly round-up of Big Apple culture in pictures

I have just noticed that the NYT arts blog is doing a weekly slideshow of it’s best culture pictures. This is a terrific idea and one that other publishers would be wise to look at and expand.

I always tell students that arts & culture reporting is now an inherently visual and multimedia form. As I have mentioned before in this blog there is no longer any excuse (such as print space excuses) for not providing multiple images with a visual arts review, for example. The other thing that I like about the NYT’s approach is that they are developing a kind of pictorial beat reporting where the significance of the images is being curated by the beat experts not by some generalist picture editor.

Weekly news summaries in pictorial, sideshow form, curated by beat editors/reporters is an idea that could be easily expanded across a range of areas. This is a good service for readers, one that works with today’s increasingly visual culture and penchant for recaps but it is also a good editorial strategy that could drive readers back to original linked articles.

Another way of developing this concept would be as “Today’s top arts stories in pictures” or “Today’s top health stories in pictures”: a visually appealing way of allowing readers to scan top stories and click through if something interests them. This is the type of idea that is being developed by a range of new emagazine style concepts for the mooted iTablet, but there is nothing to stop traditional web publishers from developing simple html versions of this style.

I think one of the consequences of new iTablet style publishing models, which are sure to have a big impact this year, will be a challenge to other web based publishing to become even more visually oriented. Most newspaper publishers have sill not caught onto the fact that the web is now an inherently visual medium. Many publishers have acknowledged the importance of the visual web with an increased emphasis on video in their reporting as well as the incorporation of slide shows and other multimedia reports. But this is not enough. News publishers need to think harder about how to place images at the centre of the reader information and navigation experience. I believe we will see a greater reliance on visual navigation, visual recap strategies and data visualisations. The slideshow – both with audio and extended captions – needs to be developed more extensively as a fully fledged stand alone reporting method rather than just as a “multimedia add-on” to a primary report.

One of the implications of this is for journalism education. Most j-ed curses have now caught up with the idea that student’s need multimedia skills but I don’t see enough evidence that these new curricula are taking issues of visual design and visual literacy seriously enough. At UOW we include two compulsory graphic design subjects and our first unit in the convergent subjects is very focused on getting students to think about simple image-based storytelling. But I think we need to do even more and start training students to think about the visual as an inherent aspect of all stories no matter their format or medium.

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Tags: arts reporting, picture beats, slideshows

NYT wants reader pics to document the decade

20Dec09

NYT's Documenting the Decade...great project but needs instant feedback with quick upload of reader images

NYT’s Documenting the Decade project is calling for reader photos and short pieces of writing that document “five important moments from the last 10 years”:

Time Magazine called it the “Decade From Hell.” New York Magazine termed it “One Wild Decade.” We want to hear from you. Help us document the decade by picking five important moments from the last 10 years — possible subjects include news or political events, culture and entertainment, business, sports or technology. Send us photos that you have taken that help illustrate those moments, plus short personal essays that explain how they define your decade. Subjects might include signs of the recent recession in your community, an event such as the Sept. 11 attacks or the 2004 tsunami, yourself at the World Series or Olympic Games, or the impact of a recent technical invention on your life.

This is a potentially very exciting project and it will be interesting to see how this evolves. However I think projects like this need to run very quickly with reader photos being visible within hours of the project’s announcement or at least at the end of every day. This creates a dynamic feedback loop and encourages participation, generates ideas for other readers and quickly turns the project from an idea to a reality. At the moment the announcement does not even include a timeframe for when and where the photos will be released which gives readers a feeling that they are sending off images into a black hole.

I understand (and value) the impulse in a major project like this to curate carefully from among the reader submitted images. There is a need to ensure that the cumulative effect of the project significantly adds to a collective image of the decade rather than just providing more background noise, but this needs to be balanced against a sense of participatory immediacy inherent in reader generated projects. This type of conflict will continue to raise its head as more media organisations embrace ambitious participatory projects.

There are several possible solutions. One is a simple templating solution that would allow for multiple views ranging from “all recent” through to category archives and various “best of”/ “editor’s choice” galleries. This would allow for immediate upload (after some moderation to check for legal issues) but would also allow for more carefully curated views to appear over time. But a better solution is to really embrace the participatory nature of the project and adopt a Digg style reader recommendation feedback loop which would allow the curation as well as the submission to become a reader generated project. This does not preclude also running an editor’s choice gallery. Web 2.0 journalism is about finding the best technical solutions to enable open, participatory projects to complement more traditional journalist reported/curated ones and for both to feedback into one another.

One of the things that we have to constantly remind ourselves of as we embrace Web 2.0 journalism more deeply is that there are no more single solutions. We no longer have to produce single all encompassing stories and we are no longer bound by either/or choices when it comes to project presentation. This does not mean that we don’t make choices: careful consideration of how we present, link and organise journalist reported and reader reported content is more critical than ever. But flexible productions with multiple ways in to rich patterns of storytelling and multiple reader driven choices will become the hallmark of quality new journalism. .

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Tags: documentary, NYT

Lessons in portraiture and lessons in web publishing

05Dec09

Robert McFarlane: Ticket to ride...Charles Perkins travelling from Sydney University to Bondi in 1961.

Robert McFarlane has produced some wonderful iconic images of Australian photojournalism. His new retrospective looks like a must see. The coverage of the exhibition also presents good lessons in how to and how not to cover the visual arts on the web.

Steve Meacham’s SMH piece is a classic interview/review: it leads with a close up of a single image and McFarlane’s anecdote of how the iconic image of late Aboriginal activist Charlie Perkins was created. Meacham and McFarlane give a succinct lesson in great portraiture: Get the subject to ignore you.

”In fact it was taken in 1961 on the bus home from Sydney Uni to Bondi,” recalls Robert McFarlane, the photojournalist who took the picture. He had persuaded a lifestyle magazine not noted for its social conscience that a profile of the emerging political leader would be a good idea.

At the time Perkins was better known as a talented soccer player and presumed McFarlane would ask him to strike the same poses requested by newspaper photographers of the time.

”But I told him just to ignore me, and he got very good at that,” laughs McFarlane

However while Meacham is in clear command of his written narrative strategies, his web-editors have ignored the inherent visual orientation of the story and the inherent visual narrative capacities of the web. Traditionally a newspaper would illustrate an art review with a single image because of space requirements. On the web they can now publish multiple images very easily, however many still do not. There is no good reason except laziness not to publish multiple images for major gallery shows where the artist or gallery would readily supply promotional images. This is a clear case of thoughtlessly carrying over old media production paradigms into new media practice. The web is a visual medium, so why not use it to advantage when dealing with visual content.

The rules have changed: web-based visual art reviews should always be accompanied by slideshows or multiple images – there are no longer any space problems and no longer any excuses.

Local site Our Manly gets the picture with their review of the same McFarlane exhibition.

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Tags: portraits, visual art reviews

Pictory: a new model for an online image magazine

03Dec09

Adam Rose: The five weeks I’d previously spent in China couldn’t prepare me for the blunt realities of India. I experienced a cremation ceremony with the family members of the deceased, rowed by the floating body of a boy killed by a snake bite, and saw incredible poverty. But I also fell in love with the brilliant colors and unfathomable mixes of life in India. I spotted this menagerie against the checkered marble in the holy city of Pushkar, India, and reflected on a country where everything is surprising.

I first saw reference to the marvelous new web mag Pictory in a tweet by Wired’s Alexis Madrigal. He sums their approach up well: “it’s like a crowdsourced, more narrative” version of Boston Globe’s Big Picture.

In her editor’s note Laura Brunow Miner sums up her aims this way:

The Internet is brimming with eye candy, but the vast majority of these images have lost their original context. Photo credits are rare and captions usually garbled, so I find myself often wondering: Who made this? What does it mean? The forces of the Internet can sometimes turn good work into confusing shrapnel.

I hope to do the opposite with Pictory. I want to collect images and stories directly from their sources: the people who create them. And then I want to make the best work that much better by editing, proofing, and compiling submissions into glossy online showcases. Big images. Careful details. Practical design. Credit and context.

Maybe it’s a new model for online magazines. Or, maybe it’s just the best I can do from my living room.

Its a knock-out in concept and execution. Beautifully designed and curated, the first story, Overseas and Overwhelmed is a poetic tour of simple stories of culture shock and culture exchange from tourist, photographer, writers. There is also an interview with Steph Goralnick: “one of the most underrated creative minds in Brooklyn”.

There is a call for submissions for up-coming stories on San Francisco, My most meaningful image and The house I grew up in. It will be very interesting to see how this new project evolves and whether it garners the support it deserves.

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Tags: crowdsourcing, multicultural reporting, online magazines

Photographing democracy

25Nov09

Baptiste Giroudon: An Afghan worker in US Military camp, August 2009

Baptiste Giroudon: Times Square November 4 2008

This is a a great example of photojournalism creating a subtle dialogue between cultures. The project eschews definitive statements, but as the photographer says it can “whisper some rough sketches as answers.” Baptiste Giroudon, is engaged in a project of photographing democracy. He has photographed the post Obama celebrations in Times Square through to the elections in Kabul. But it is not just the trappings of democracy that he is interested in, He asks can these photographs say something about the values of democracy?

I am interested in democracy and the belief structure that it carries in societies today. That is why I started my project about democracy and elections in the world. The first part of this work is set in New York City on the night President Obama was elected. As a counterpoint to that night I followed my theme to Kabul and photographed during the presidential campaign in Afghanistan

Picturing the run for president in these very different countries seems very far from a ‘good comparison’, but putting together pictures of the people in the street, portraits of different classes, reveals some evidence: People share similar hopes, in Afghanistan or in the United States, and I believe all around the world. They look forward to better governance, for change, for a good life under a democratic system. The question is… can democracy bring that?

I don’t know but I think this kind of project can whisper some rough sketches as answers. I think both the interest and the role of photography relies not only in telling stories but also in asking questions.
Those questions are still in my mind today as I embark on the further photographic investigation into this idea : What does an election for a citizen in Afghanistan mean?. What does he or she think about democracy? Surely a strange concept for a country that has been in a state of war for more than 30 years, whilst at the same time, for Americans, democracy is incredibly evolved and used as the very basis of society.

Finally, as a photo-reporter, I travel widely and see many different things, experiencing a variety of situations. This way of life permits me to present my point of view to the different stories I work on. This is why I think these images work together well enough to be produced and shown as a single body of work.

Click thorugh for the full NY/Kabul slideshow and check out Baptiste Giroudon’s site for other projects in the series.

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Tags: democracy, multicultural reporting, photojournalism

Don’t disconnect your mutlimedia from the story

25Nov09

One of my big themes this semester has been the development of multimedia story modules. So it was disheartening over the last few weeks to have to rehash this in my assignment notes to students. Although many students developed fine interelated multimedia stories they were still not good at completing the circle – often the links only went one way. They were still thinking in terms of connecting “pages” of “chronological” narrative, rather than thinking of their stories as part of the circular interplay of the web.

But it is not just students who are guilty of this. I just stumbled across this lost video content in an smh.com sidebar, with only the question: “Is this man Anthony Waterloo?” It has no self contained intro or audio and is clearly only meant originally as an addition to a larger story. If you click through to the main multimedia page you get the context and even a link to the story:

CCTV footage released by NSW Police appears to show Anthony Waterlow – being sought after the stabbing death of his father and sister – using an ATM in Randwick.25/11/09

Anthony Waterlow may have been spotted at ATM: police

more about “Don’t disconnect your mutlimedia for …“, posted with vodpod

Online mutlimedia can only enhance the conversation if it is part of carefully constructed story modules that clearly link backwards and forwards to each other.

Mindy McAdam’s describes the idea of a “story module” in multimedia reporting:

About these “modules”: The idea is to satisfy the curiosity of anyone who comes to this story, regardless of what he or she is curious about. So a module is a device to answer a certain cluster of questions, to meet a particular type of interest. People can dive straight into any module from the outset, and they can ignore all the other modules if they want to. They can explore the modules in any order.

In her article “Journalism stories: A multimedia approach” she describes some ideas for generating story modues

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Tags: story modules, web design

Slideshows can be “interactive”

19Nov09

The visual arts often raise important social questions and creative representations of current exhibitions are a great way to encourage image conversations with your readers.

This slideshow, from KCET’s SoCal Connected, about a recent art show is a great example of how to make your slideshows interactive – ask your viewers to actively piece together the information.

The art installation by Travis Somerville plays with the notion of stereotypes from the days in the South when “Whites only ” and “Blacks only” drinking fountains “were not art, but real life”. KCET asks their viewers to see if they can spot the stereotypes:

Sommerville has taken the idea to another level. Whether it’s a higher or lower level is up to you, but here’s a kind of puzzle made from the images to see how quickly you can recognize the stereotypes.

We are now at a stage with online presentations where sites that do not provide a slideshow with their review of an exhibition are not really doing their job. This NYT review of a group show of Pakistani artists was fascinating but desperately needed a slideshow of the art it talked about.

This slideshow about a recent Ed Ruscha retrospective is a perfect example of how you can use slideshows together with extended captions to provide a detailed self contained review.

more about “Swallowing Stereotypes – SoCal Connected“, posted with vodpod

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Tags: art reviews, slideshows

YouTube Direct for news

17Nov09

YouTube has just announced an exciting opportunity that will allow news organisations and community groups to use a new service to generate user content. It will allow other media organisations to replicate a CNN iReport style structure without setting up their own infrastructure. Media Week reports:

YouTube is set to roll out a free tool that will enable any news-oriented site to automatically become a hub for user-produced news videos. The company has introduced YouTube Direct, an open source platform that any interested news site can tap into and begin soliciting content from its users. The Google-owned company has already begun testing YouTube Direct with The Huffington Post, NPR.com, Politico.com and the Web sites for the San Francisco Chronicle and WHDH-TV/WLVI-TV in Boston, Mass.

According to Steve Grove, head of news and politics at YouTube, news sites can easily add Direct to their sites; start requesting specific content from users (such as eyewitness videos of the most recent hurricane, for example); and then decide for themselves what clips are used on their own sites when. The tool is designed to be customizable, allowing news sites to create a product that looks and feels like the rest of their Web site. “This is like a virtual assignment desk,” said Grove.

Throughout YouTube’s history, users have posted news-oriented clips, said Grove. But those have been tough for news sites to find in a timely fashion, making it hard for them to leverage.

“Citizen journalism is one of the most interesting phenomenon on YouTube,” he said—citing Hurricane Katrina and the 2008 election as examples. “But news organizations have had a hard time tapping into that. Videos are hard to find, verification can be tough and there is not really a great way on the site to target contributors….This is about giving our news community something they are asking for.”

It is now up and ready on the YouTube site. Here’s the post from the YouTube biz blog

Here’s the project page

And the FAQ.

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Tags: video, YouTube