donderdag, juli 01, 2004
Er is weer een nieuwe editie uit van "Photojournalism - The Professionals' Approach", het standaardwerk van Ken Kobre.
Kobre heeft ook een uitgesproken mening over fotojournalistiek op internet, vooral over het minieme formaat waarin foto's op het web getoond worden:
Even if they have the most important visual of the day. Even if it is a picture of prisoner abuse from the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq, it's posted the same size as a picture of the Queen on a different day or the Queen's dog. Ken Kobré, professor of photojournalism at San Francisco State University, says online news sites have sapped the drama out of visuals. Most leading news sites are no better at using pictures than magazines were in the 1920s. When you look at most leading sites - including the BBC and GuardianUnlimited the pictures are phenomenally small and they are not really used for excitement or information. Instead they are merely used to break up a long grey column. When pictures are used, they are often only thumbnails, or are cropped into pre-sized boxes. So one of the tools of using size to emphasise importance and drama is not being used. It is easy to make internet pages fixed in terms of format - that makes it easy to get the page out every day - but the reverse is that it is not good journalism.
Even when space is made for photography, the pages or sections look like little old-fashioned slide shows. Many sites are separating the pictures in slideshows from the text and that takes away a lot of the drama of the pictures. They are being ghettoised. News site slide shows are clumsy because they have been separated from the text. When pictures are ghettoised, they are no longer part of the experience of seeing pictures and reading the story simultaneously and integrating the two. They have now become disassociated. You don’t want to commit the time to opening a slide show. With a magazine, you read the story and look at the pictures and get an integrated and real experience.
News sites have become 'homogenised'. The good pictures don't seem to have any impact and the bad ones don't look too bad. Most mainstream news sites rely on images from the wire services such as Associated Press, Reuters and AFP.
Every study that has been done with print shows that the bigger the picture, the more people look at the story and the more they remember the story. This is the most compelling reason to use pictures from the writer's point of view. There is no use in writing if nobody is going to read it. Very few sites are hiring professional photographers. Online news has not been the great boon for photojournalists that was predicted. Instead it has become more or less a dumping ground for visuals that were created for the print versions. There is no competition forcing sites to become better visually.
Two sites that have experimented successfully in using photojournalism more effectively: MSNBC and the Washington Post. The DigitalJournalist and SportsShooter.com are also sites that highlight cutting edge work both in print and online.
As long as there are words in print or words on the screen, the still picture will survive. The issue is not whether photojournalism will die - it is how photojournalism is integrated into the copy.
Bron: dotJournalism.
Kobre heeft ook een uitgesproken mening over fotojournalistiek op internet, vooral over het minieme formaat waarin foto's op het web getoond worden:
Even if they have the most important visual of the day. Even if it is a picture of prisoner abuse from the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq, it's posted the same size as a picture of the Queen on a different day or the Queen's dog. Ken Kobré, professor of photojournalism at San Francisco State University, says online news sites have sapped the drama out of visuals. Most leading news sites are no better at using pictures than magazines were in the 1920s. When you look at most leading sites - including the BBC and GuardianUnlimited the pictures are phenomenally small and they are not really used for excitement or information. Instead they are merely used to break up a long grey column. When pictures are used, they are often only thumbnails, or are cropped into pre-sized boxes. So one of the tools of using size to emphasise importance and drama is not being used. It is easy to make internet pages fixed in terms of format - that makes it easy to get the page out every day - but the reverse is that it is not good journalism.
Even when space is made for photography, the pages or sections look like little old-fashioned slide shows. Many sites are separating the pictures in slideshows from the text and that takes away a lot of the drama of the pictures. They are being ghettoised. News site slide shows are clumsy because they have been separated from the text. When pictures are ghettoised, they are no longer part of the experience of seeing pictures and reading the story simultaneously and integrating the two. They have now become disassociated. You don’t want to commit the time to opening a slide show. With a magazine, you read the story and look at the pictures and get an integrated and real experience.
News sites have become 'homogenised'. The good pictures don't seem to have any impact and the bad ones don't look too bad. Most mainstream news sites rely on images from the wire services such as Associated Press, Reuters and AFP.
Every study that has been done with print shows that the bigger the picture, the more people look at the story and the more they remember the story. This is the most compelling reason to use pictures from the writer's point of view. There is no use in writing if nobody is going to read it. Very few sites are hiring professional photographers. Online news has not been the great boon for photojournalists that was predicted. Instead it has become more or less a dumping ground for visuals that were created for the print versions. There is no competition forcing sites to become better visually.
Two sites that have experimented successfully in using photojournalism more effectively: MSNBC and the Washington Post. The DigitalJournalist and SportsShooter.com are also sites that highlight cutting edge work both in print and online.
As long as there are words in print or words on the screen, the still picture will survive. The issue is not whether photojournalism will die - it is how photojournalism is integrated into the copy.
Bron: dotJournalism.
# posted by Jan-Edward : 17:16
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