By Bliss Davis, Bowling Green State University Journalism Student
One of my favorite photo galleries is Boston.com’s The Big Picture. True to its name it features, well, really big pictures: crisp, clear and tell a good chunk of the story at hand before you get to the caption at the bottom.
Now, I’m not sure as to when The Big Picture came into being (feel free to indulge me!), but it represents a web trend I’ve been seeing for quite some time: big pictures, and often with it a preference for very horizontal layouts. In lieu of the evolution of convergence, print and broadcast media have always agreed on one thing: visuals do a great job of moving a story along. Pictures are really worth a thousand words.
Here are a few sites that beautifully utilize visuals, per myself and my small group of awesome high school journalism students 🙂 :
This is obviously a short list and there are many other news oriented sites out there that demonstrate this trend. It looks like one that’ll stick, that is, become the norm or even a standard on many sites. Now I don’t necessarily think pictures will mimic the page swallowing size of those on The Big Picture, but definitely those in actual stories (versus bona fide galleries) on TBO and NBC-Universal owned sites.
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