Slashdot Mirror
Not Every Article Needs a Picture (theoutline.com)
An anonymous reader shares an article: Pictures and text often pair nicely together. You have an article about a thing, and the picture illustrates that thing, which in many cases helps you understand the thing better. But on the web, this logic no longer holds, because at some point it was decided that all texts demand a picture. It may be of a tangentially related celeb. It may be a stock photo of a person making a face. It may be a Sony logo, which is just the word SONY. I have been thinking about this for a long time and I think it is stupid. I understand that images -- clicks is industry gospel, but it seems like many publishers have forgotten their sense of pride. If a picture is worth a thousand words, it's hard for me to imagine there'll be much value in the text of an article illustrated by a generic stock image. As with so many problems, social media seems to deserve much of the blame for this. Until the mid-to-late '00s, a publication's homepage played a dominant role in driving people to individual articles. Homepages mostly mimicked the front pages of newspapers, where major stories -- things that warranted investment in original art -- had images. Other stories just got a headline. Over time, the endless space of the internet lowered the standard for which articles needed art, but still, not everything got an image. [...] Even the unflinching belief that people won't read articles if there aren't pictures doesn't hold up to logic. Sure, interesting pictures can attract readers, but most of these images are not interesting. And even if it were slightly better for business, is that really a compromise worth making?
Now almost every journal requires you to send a "TOC graphic" with your article.
You could have some fun with that.
Have gnu, will travel.
You can accomplish nearly the same effect though with graphic elements (think fancy lines and swirls) at occasional points through the text. They have the advantage of not taking you out of the article you are reading by making your brain process what it is seeing in a picture.
Also it sure seems like a lot of websites that have images in articles have a lot of advertising all around the page (all of which are images), which leads to real image overload and is yet another distraction - your brain has to actively consider if an image in the article is an ad it should ignore, or an image related to content that it should pay attention to.
Sure you want to break up text but every image is another point when I may well abandon reading if I am taken out far enough and cared only moderately for the content and writing.
I would note in closing that hundreds of thousands of books don't seem to have any issue with needing images to break up text, and people read them just fine... maybe some sites should try catering to serious readers.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Firefox has an option to disable media autoplay. https://support.mozilla.org/en...
Circumcision is child abuse.