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?

Comments

Re:Not every article need scrolling effects either

[HumanWiki]

Nor should there be 1 picture per page for 25 pages and ignore that you're simply trying to generate more Ad Rev by making me click through page after page.

I've pretty much stopped reading articles once I see that mess.

Video is the real devil

[PCM2]

Forget images. Who decided that when I'm reading a news story -- and this might be a dozen paragraphs of text, now -- I'd want a video of someone reciting a paraphrased version of that same story to play automatically and cover part of the text I'm trying to read?

Re:Video is the real devil

[TheReaperD]

I'd live with crappy stock images all day but, down with those damn auto-play videos; especially the ones with NO TEXT TRANSCRIPT! Hear that you damn "news" sites, I want to actually fucking READ the article, not listen to some idiot blather about it, go off-topic, then offer his/her opinion without actually offering much in the way of facts. Next up is the articles broken into multiple pages to try and maximize the ads shown on a page. Worst I've seen so far is 13 pages for 13 paragraphs of text. Ridiculous! Whoever was responsible for that should be fired on the spot.

Re:Not every article need scrolling effects either

[cayenne8]

I think it is just another symptom of the dumbing down of the general population....

You're talking now about a significant number of the populace that can't read a book, even if it has pictures....and people you can ask "who won the civil war", and will either not know the answer, or answer "America?".

It's just been a steady downhill spiral with the common least denominator dropping at an alarming rate.