1. Telling Stories With Pictures How (And Why) To Integrate Photojournalism Western Knight Center Seminar “The Business of Online Journalism: Breaking the News without Breaking the Bank” Janice Castro The Medill School of Journalism Northwestern University

2. Janice Castro Copyright 2004 Janice Castro Multimedia Journalism at Medill BSJ program: Converging process. Undergrads choose a track (Reporting and Writing, Magazine, Broadcast). Electives offer web-building skills, blogging and hypertext writing, news in the context of new media, photojournalism, precision reporting, scenario planning. All undergrads get some New Media, Broadcast experience. Second-year students produce multimedia packages incorporating Web, broadcast and print.

3. Janice Castro Copyright 2004 Janice Castro Medill New Media MSJ MSJ program: New Media, Magazine, Newspaper, Broadcast. Medill News Service: Chicago, Washington. Medill Global. MSJ New Media: Research, Product Development, and Advanced skills. Web-building, Dreamweaver and HTML, Photoshop, Storyboarding and Design, Flash, CMS. Cross-platform media planning and prototype development.

4. Janice Castro Copyright 2004 Janice Castro Consider the long, long history of online publishing. 10 years. Not nearly long enough to develop tried-and-true editing and presentation methods... … or lifelong reading habits. The computer screen as a reading environment: Not the glossy touch and feel of magazine pages. Not the comfortable fold and flip of newspaper pages. Not the quick hits and passive experience of television.

5. Janice Castro Copyright 2004 Janice Castro Not the same as … Cozy sharing of stories, or Cuddling up with a good read.

6. Janice Castro Copyright 2004 Janice Castro The online reading experience Staring into a flickering light. Three-dimensional navigation. Entering the news space. Driving through the content. Making choices among media types, content segments. Opening doors from one paragraph to the next, And from one chapter or article to the next. Engaging and interacting.

7. Janice Castro Copyright 2004 Janice Castro Why use more photo and graphics illustration? Readers are becoming visual learners. They expect to see the story they are reading. Text no longer is enough. The experience of reading and absorbing a description must be accompanied by images. No longer a question of special topics or mega-stories justifying more lavish illustration.

8. Janice Castro Copyright 2004 Janice Castro What has changed? The impact of the Web has amplified the visual influence of broadcasting on reader expectations. Images no longer “something to break up those blocks of text.” Multiple forms of media, multiple types of storytelling. In some ways, text is becoming the connective tissue. Publications have grown more sophisticated in their use of photography and news graphics. Estimate of changes at a newsmagazine: 1970: 10 percent; 1990: 40 percent; 2004?

9. Janice Castro Copyright 2004 Janice Castro Recent upshift: After September 11, online news editors saw a huge spike in photography pageviews of all kinds. People lingered over the news pictures to an unprecedented degree. At chicagotribune.com, which publishes the contents of the Chicago Tribune each day, editors report that photography now is by far the most popular content. Impact on major stories: Tribune commemorative 9/11 CD. In 2002, for the first time, Time Magazine published a special issue on Pictures of the Year as its annual news summary.

10. Janice Castro Copyright 2004 Janice Castro On news sites, photo essays above the fold msnbc.com brings television’s visual immediacy to its online stories. One picture may tell the story. Newspapers with huge photos almost look like screens.

11. Janice Castro Copyright 2004 Janice Castro Washingtonpost.com: pictures of the day, photographers’ portfolios, essays on every topic Jahi Chickwendiu “Eyes of History” portfolio, 1 st place, White House News Photographers Association, Feb. 2004

12. Janice Castro Copyright 2004 Janice Castro Nytimes.com: Photographers’ journals, Correspondents’ interactive reports Amit Bhargava/Corbis for The New York Times

13. Janice Castro Copyright 2004 Janice Castro Have You Listened to an NPR photo essay? Original audio from NPR’s “All Things Considered” is presented on the Web complete with photo essays, interactive maps and video. Detail from Daniel Robinson’s painting “Barge”

14. Janice Castro Copyright 2004 Janice Castro Scenes From A Narrative... Left: “Monterey County” (Daniel Robinson, oil on canvas) Right: “Western Landscape” (Daniel Robinson, oil on canvas)

15. Janice Castro Copyright 2004 Janice Castro Adding visual grammar to radio Listen to the audio while viewing the art NPR is describing at the Smithsonian’s new National Museum of the American Indian Credits: Left, Eskimo Mask, credit Ernest Amoroso ; Right, Apache Basket, courtesy Smithsonian Institution

16. Janice Castro Copyright 2004 Janice Castro Pace of change How did we get here? Radio with photo-essays?

17. Janice Castro Copyright 2004 Janice Castro Technology changes often regulate editorial innovation: Airspeed: when Winston Churchill died in 1965, LIFE magazine chartered a jet to speed photos of his funeral into print … On-air speed: … but did not reap the sales its editors anticipated, because so many readers had already watched it on television. Digital speed: In 1985, when President Reagan visited the Bitburg cemetary in West Germany on a Sunday, TIME made its Monday newsstand deadline by transmitting the cover digitally.

18. Janice Castro Copyright 2004 Janice Castro A longterm trend: fewer words per page. 40 years ago, a magazine page was dense with text. People experienced the content by poring over the words, absorbing the images the writer described. 30 years ago, the words were getting further apart on the page. More white space, larger headlines Longer text blocks introducing stories, then replacing stories.

19. Janice Castro Copyright 2004 Janice Castro Phase one: Television made the news vivid For roughly 30 years, Americans watched the same news at the same time every evening. Pictures told the stories. In the 1980s, satellites began bringing us pictures from everywhere in the world. We could see what was happening in remote locations live. Feeling everyone’s pain. Continuous coverage of major events as a staple of news. Watching the story unfold increasingly important.

20. Janice Castro Copyright 2004 Janice Castro Phase two: the light box The Web redoubled the visual impact. Interactivity deepened the reader’s relationship with the screen and the story: Readers could touch the story, navigate through it. Moreover, online editors discovered early that computer screens displayed photography vividly. Photographs became doorways into the stories. Time White House photographer Diana Walker gave time.com its first photo gallery -- on life behind the scenes in Washington.

21. Janice Castro Copyright 2004 Janice Castro Time.com’s Walker: Cronkite at the White House.

22. Janice Castro Copyright 2004 Janice Castro LIFE’s Joe McNally showed us life in Siberia.

23. Janice Castro Copyright 2004 Janice Castro And the “Faces of Ground Zero.”

24. Janice Castro Copyright 2004 Janice Castro In fact, the story of the decade was a picture story.

25. Janice Castro Copyright 2004 Janice Castro Suzanne Plunkett/AP

26. Janice Castro Copyright 2004 Janice Castro Amy Sancetta/AP

27. Janice Castro Copyright 2004 Janice Castro Suzanne Plunkett/AP

28. Janice Castro Copyright 2004 Janice Castro Marty Lederhandler/AP

29. Janice Castro Copyright 2004 Janice Castro Studying how reader perception works online Stanford-Poynter eye-tracking: studying how people explore content on computer screens. Grazing, then pausing to absorb. Heat maps. Seeing vs. hearing. Show me the news.

30. Janice Castro Copyright 2004 Janice Castro What online readership tells us about print Print’s audience forms visual learning habits on screens. Share of mind: time spent with non-editorial media. OPA: 18 to 34s living online. 24 percent from friends’ homes, 16 percent from cell phones. Television gave us larger illustrations and more white space on the page. The Web is giving us non-linear habits and photographs as doorways. Cell phones the newest small screen. More research on the way.

31. Thank you! Janice Castro jcastro@northwestern.edu (847) 467 1770