Jason Sandford
Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.
An insightful comment from a commentor over at Gannett Blog, one of the hottest blogs going right now when it comes to keeping tabs on what’s happening to the newspaper industry. Read the comments below and you’ll notice that the Citizen-Times is following this strategy:
Yes, you’re right. Every single picture is a click. You may have 3,000 clicks on a photo gallery, but if there are 20 pictures in that gallery, you only reached maximum of about 150 people… but 3,000 sounds a lot better when you’re trying to sell advertising.
Why do you think Gannett photojournalists are being told by Exec. Eds and Managing Eds to put up as many giant galleries as possible from as many assignments as possible?
50+ picture galleries from sports events…
50+ picture galleries of historic photos…
25+ picture galleries from spot news events…
Photo galleries from the grand opening of the new chain pizza restaurant…
Don’t think for a second that photo galleries are going up on the sites to bolster the quality of the news report. (A 5-to-10-picture gallery is what does that by adding more visual context to a story.)
In most cases, anything above 15 pictures does nothing but dilute the strongest pictures with repetitive, redundant pictures… all to meet the quotas we’re given to fill.
The only goal is to inflate our sites’ numbers…
There was a day not too long ago (maybe just a couple of years ago) when coming back from an assignment with 10 solid, storytelling photographs worthy of publication was lauded and praised.
There used to be a clear division between the skilled, professionally-trained newspaper photojournalist and the hack that shot on the sidelines to later sell prints to parents. Gannett’s done nothing but blur that line…
We need a system of metrics in our industry to know how many people we’re reaching. But for god’s sakes… we never would have measured our print circulation by how many individual people glanced at the extra jump photographs on A3 and how many people read the business story on D1. We’ve always measured our success in the past by how many people pick up our papers… How many people look to us for answers to their questions and curiosities about the news happening in the world around them.
And when you compare apples to apples: number of daily papers, versus number of unique daily visitors on Gannett websites, print is still ahead.
You guys think print is dead, or going to be dead? That’s never going to happen… not until we stop worrying about clicks and successfully grow our online “circulation” to surpass our print numbers.
Zipperhead, is this true? I can’t believe it.
The ACT will soon charge a nickle to view any picture on their web site. They feel this is the only way to bring up the numbers that retail advertising has flushed down the toilet.
also because they apparently have lost any sense of what a good picture is… when they turn down a freelance photos of a news event, which was a high-res, well-lit photo with good composition and run in its place A CELLPHONE pic taken by a reporter….
well
I would say photojournalism is dead, at least at the C-T