How to use photographs to attract readers
Online journalism is visual journalism. Adapting how newspapers use photographs can increase the number of readers who look past the image to read our text.
IF professions have parents, then Tim Berners Lee is the father of online and citizen journalism. When in 1989 he invented the system of open, linked data stocks and flows that became known as the Worldwide Web, he probably didn’t envisage how it would evolve into a medium dominated by visual media.
As citizen journalists we deal in the visual media, combining images with text. Our job, for many of us anyway, is to tell stories in words and images such as photographs and video. Those of us whose citizen journalism is mainly text can still make effective use of imagery because images attract readers to our text.
Photograph as story leader
One way, and an important way, to use images is to use a photograph as a leader to our story. Internet research has consistently shown that when a story is accompanied by a photograph there is a greater change it will be read. The content of a photo can stimulate curiosity, and that curiosity can be fulfilled by reading the text.
Back to the age of newspapers
How do we do this? Let’s look back to the age of the print newspaper, the time before the internet.
Because of the way people move their eyes over a printed page and because of how they fold newspapers to carry them, certain locations on a page are more valuable in attracting attention. For photographs, the prime place is what is called ‘above the fold’. Above, that is, where the first fold of a newspaper is made.
So, what does the world of newspaper page design have to do with online journalism?
Plenty, when it comes to designing our blog pages.
For citizen journalists, placing a photograph prominently in a place equivalent to above the fold of a newspaper draws the eye to our story. It may also appear in the snippets of a search engine.
We do this by placing an attractive photograph below or close to the headline, or above. We place it high up near the start of the story where it will be visible on a screen when the page is opened. That might not happen on a mobile phone screen on which photos may be streamed within the text.
The photo at the start of this story is an example. It is accompanied by a caption which links it to the story that follows. Like this photo, any that we use should relate to the story if only in a generic way.
If you do not do photography, look for a royalty-free, public domain photo or one cleared for reuse by a Creative Commons licence. It is a practice in citizen journalism that in the caption we state the Creative Commons licence information or the name of the photographer or that of the organisation which owns the photograph. Doing that avoids using someone’s copyright image without permission.
Even though citizen journalists might work in one form of journalism such as text, learning to use a basic point-and-shoot camera to make leader photographs provides us with a useful tool that can attract readers to our blog.
More Citizens Journalism
Citizen Journalism on facebook
