Quote:
Originally Posted by manny_santos
Has anyone noticed the odd use of images on the Free Press website?... They also seem to be using a lot of images just for the sake of images... It doesn't add anything to the article, except that I must scroll a lot further to read an article that is a fraction of the size of the radio image. All that image for a 3-paragraph news brief....
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Many newspapers made a conscious business decision about 5 or so years ago to shift their content strategy. Some even published articles in their own newspapers prior to making the shift in order to defend what was about to be rolled out to their readership, claiming the change was what their readership wanted. Basically it was the replacement of dense text with more & larger images, larger headlines & fonts, and shortening & simplifying the actual stories. This strategy is especially prevalent in mid-sized city newspapers owned by larger parent publications. The actual reasons are many fold:
1) The parent companies have purchased and hollowed out once robust and well respected publications such as the Freep (Quebecor in this case). As such, there are now a lesser number of local reporters of lesser skills that produce less local content than in the past. One or two local photographers with digital cameras can however easily and cheaply fill up the space on the page originally taken up by words.
2) Lots of flashy images attempt to compete with other multimedia content sources such as TV and the internet. Basically adding sensationalism to grab and hold attention.
3) Limited attention span of the audience. Many stories are reduced to print versions of sound bites. Pictures are pretty and reading takes effort.
4) The complexity standard for journalism is now a grade 7 reading level. I'm not making that up - that's the standard. The result is less content to the stories because they have to be told in the simplest way possible. An extreme example would be a story about the supercollider atom smasher at CERN in Europe. This could be a very fascinating story, but the reader will get only that this is a very large and expensive machine that "probes the mysteries of the universe" (a catchphrase that they use for any science/technology more complex than a high school lab experiment). There will then be a large image of said atom smasher to emphasize that it is very large, expensive, and complex.
5) Larger fonts for an aging readership, and large "screamer" headlines to sensationalize things and, once again, to take up page space once filled with actual content.
Basically the result is everything is being dumbed down. The large, meaningless images that you are seeing attached to the stories that you are reading on their web site is just an adherence to their current hardcopy publishing standards: a big picture for every story. Why the stock photos though? That's nothing more than laziness and a general lack of staff and resources to do a proper job. It all adds up to a generally lower standard of journalism.
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