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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?
If "an image for every article" is the current fashion, I worry that could quickly morph to "images and scrolling effects for every article" You already see a ton of that across articles today.
I find it really distracting, and has the effect often I think of creating a distraction if the scrolling is at all choppy (which it almost always is).
The fundamental problem is there are so many places that want content now that the little content there is is being stretched super thin, with layers of articles referencing a single original piece of work. I'm not quite sure how to solve that but I think eventually we'll see new approaches that are not quite so insane.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
I'll agree that stock photos are lame. BUT, photos are not just about communicating information; photos are also layout elements that break up the huge mass of text, and make an article more readable, or, less intimidating to read. So, I can live with the lame stock photos, as better than nothing.
Social media and the rest want to see an og:image (or similar) meta tag, should you happen to post a link.
Once you have selected something suitable for a 'hero' image, you may as well use it to add some colour to your page.
For me it was near impossible to manage manually on my main site, so I simply have some scripts to manage and insert variants of the basic hero image I selected, so it's nearly free. And yes, I work very hard to keep the page-weight down, coming in an order of magnitude below typical, including the image(s), AFAIK.
Rgds
Damon
PS. I use very little stock, maybe 2 or 3 total out of hundreds of pages' images.
http://m.earth.org.uk/
I've also seen tons of stories with a headline similar to "Drone takes amazing pictures of volcano" without the actual picture.
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?
Breakfast served all day!
i.e. facebook's all too common mode of putting large font text in a big block of color - social media's version of all caps SHOUTING in my mind. Apparently people can't read normal sized text...
How will we know a story is about a legitimate cyber security threat without a picture of a kid in a black hoodie?
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
If only modern articles didn't require 50 megs of JavaScript( mostly in the form of bloated libraries ) just to display! Yes, I'm exaggerating, but holy shit modern websites are a waste of bandwidth in general for what little information they provide. And fuck Animated GIFs to high hell! These stupid little animations are often 100s of megs in size and that's not an exaggeration.
In utter irony, linked TFA when clicked displays a full screen image before you can scroll down and actually read the story.
Videos are huge waste of time for me. I'm a reader and find that that most videos that run for minutes only really contain a paragraph's amount of information that I could read in a few seconds.
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.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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.
This guy not sure interrupted me while I was watching Ow, My Balls and that is not ok.
So if your content is to appear in a biased, bigoted, populist, publication (I realise that doesn't narrow the field very much) then having a face of a member of whichever group you wish your readers to associate with whatever the article is about, speaks volumes that you couldn't possibly put into words.
It's like the music in a film's sound track. It "tells" us when we should feel sad. it programmes us to expect danger. It builds up tension, fear, light-heartedness. So the pictures do the same for an article.
For newspapers and corporations that feel they are too "enlightened" to specifically mention the race, gender, creed or age of someone - then a photo of them does the job without them dirtying their hands with a specific -ism.
And hopefully, the audience won't notice when one of those images just happens to be an advertisement!
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
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.
Webpages in the last five years have turned into absolute shit I find that I can barely surf the web without some type of adblocker installed. And most webpages seem to have the urge to randomly refresh themselves, which causes whatever I was planning on clicking on no longer being in that spot where my mouse/finger is, and I wind up clicking on something else that I didn't intent to. And I can't blame it on just click-baity or news sites, because even the login pages for my finances (banks, credit card, etc.) seem to randomly reload as well, forcing me to start all over typing in my credentials. I think the people that design websites now don't actually ever USE their own website.
.
Now, you'll have to excuse me. There are some kids on my lawn I need to chase away....
The hilarious thing to me about that is I've been conditioned to see those blocks of color with words as typically being a copy paste from elsewhere. I frequently just keep scrolling without even attempting to read it because I presume it isn't something my friend actually wrote.
Remember when information density was a thing? On my glorious 30", 1600px-high display at work, this page takes THREE screenfuls. https://about.mattermost.com/
Select all, copy, paste, word count: 298 words.
As for file size, the page itself -- no includes -- is 650k. When I save as an archive with scripts and images, it's 4.5 MB.
FOR ONE FUCKING PAGE. With 298 words. Unreal.
And this page, from Apple: https://www.apple.com/iphone/c... -- long rant at http://pixelcity.com/index.php...
TL;DR: 1,049 vertical pixels are used for SIX lines of text.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
There is an information glut. There is nothing to "solve" except to accept that there is an information glut, and stop returning to low quality sources of information.
Most have the same problem, but not all do. What are the people who find a lot of high quality content doing differently? Could it be as simple as the algorithm they use to decide which links to click on, and which to skip over? Does it require always opening links in new tabs so that there is less of a time penalty to closing a newly opened link as soon as it starts displaying lame or trendy web design? Does it require the discipline not to turn on javascript, but instead to simply close the tab and try a different source of information?
How good a monetization strategy? Every time a search pulls up a video when I just wanted text telling me what I needed to know, it gets ignored. I'm not going to waste time looking at the pretty moving pictures. They haven't achieved anything but irritating me immensely.
Worse, a video for every article, generally with auto-play. And usually all the video consists of is some talking head reciting the article more or less verbatim, with no added information, just a waste of bandwidth.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
Sometime ago CNN decided that every article required a Video to go with it. Yes - sometimes the video is the TV broadcast recording of the article.
But **many** times the video has little to do with the article itself. For example if Boeing is having an off year the accompanying video might have to do with the launch of the 787 Dreamliner from a few years ago. And then when the video is finished playing it just moves onto whatever video is next available. Somebody was tasked with "find a video" and they do. One cannot watch the selected video and be informed about the actual Text of the article.
Think of all the used bandwidth due to this. Not that I've looked hard - but I haven't found an easy way to block their new video platform. Used to be I could block Flash until clicked.
cayenne8 opined:
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.
What you say is true, but I think root causes bear examination (because just bellyaching about societial problems doesn't really accomplish much):
a. The problem of functional illiteracy in the U.S. is, I think, directly traceable to the policy of teaching reading skills via the "whole word" approach. This method severs each word from the language as a whole, and it actively discourages generalized thinking in new readers. The result of generations of this misguided educational philosophy - which is omnipresent in public school education in this country - is that the vast majority of the population regards reading as a chore, rather than a pleasure. So most Americans avoid it whenever possible. A phonics-centered approach, by contrast, introduces beginning readers to the structural components of language that all English words share: the individual sounds that make up the spoken language, and the syllables that represent them in the written one. It enables the reader to "sound out" unfamiliar words, and to easily grasp that many words are related to a core meaning via prefixes and suffixes. Instead of a laborious process of memorizing vocabulary lists, it encourages the reader to approach discovering new words as an exercise in problem-solving. A puzzle, if you will. Were the public education establishment to discard the disasterous policy of "whole word" memorization - and the incredibly dull, mindlessly repetitive primer texts it has generated - in favor of phonics, students could easily progress from simple, introductory material to much more complex, subtle, and interesting stuff quite rapidly. And thereby learn to love reading, rather than seeing it as a boring chore to be avoided whenever possible.
b. The abandonment of teaching history and context in favor of "teaching the (standardized educational accomplishment) tests" has robbed millenials, in particular, of an understanding of how we got here. Anything that happened before they entered school is history - and history doesn't interest them. Nor are they alone. We would not have gotten enmired in Iraq (thereby generating legions of extremists bent on jihad against "the crusaders"), had more Americans remembered the cruel lessons of the Vietnam War. But we don't teach that - and students don't read history on their own, because "whole word" methods have actively discouraged them from reading anything.
c. The omnipresent use of TV as an electronic babysitter - especially given how mind-numbing so much of children's programming is - encourages passivity, and the belief that all problems, no matter how complex or recondite, are handily solvable inside of no more than an hour, including commercial breaks. The current explosion of programming sources, particularly premium-channel cable/satellite and online streaming services, that increasingly are adopting long-form storytelling is encouraging - but it's a trend that programming aimed at children has not adopted.
d. The millenial generation's reliance on "just in time" knowledge, mostly via Wikipedia, has entirely robbed them of context. They don't study things. They simply look them up on Wikipedia, whenever they have a question about a particular subject. What they don't get is the historical, cultural, literary, or mythological context in which that individual datum exists. Instead, it's a naked factoid, isolated from its antecedants and effects on the fabric of knowledge itself. They get the "what", but not the "
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DNS-and-BIND blathered:
Phonics was discredited decades ago as boring and dull for children. They weren't learning, especially most disadvantaged children in our inner cities. We needed an approach that they could excel at.
Oh, really? Perhaps you should tell that to the National Institute of Health, because their 2000 article on the report of the Congressionally-mandated, independent National Reading Panel concludes exactly the opposite. Or, if you require training wheels, you'll have an easier time of it with PBS's summary of the panel's major findings.
But, since you have such a well-documented contempt for all things USA, you might be more comfortable referring to the Australian state of New South Wales Department of Education and Training's Literacy Teaching Guide: Phonics, instead. Or, given your general dismissal of governments as oppressors, it's possible that a private corporation that has spent decades focusing on primary-level educational materials like Scholastic.com's Parent & Child Magazine could seem more credible to you.
Or, alternatively, you could just read the Wikipedia page on phonics, which not only explains what phonics is and how it works, but goes into the history and controversy of phonics, especially phonics vs. whole language, not only in the USA, but in Australia, Great Britain, and Canada, as well.
There're plenty of other resources available to support the view that phonics (and its sister technique phonemics - you really need to use them in combination with each other for best results), in conjunction with primer material that is actually interesting, is the most effective strategy for teaching new readers.
And I'm sure you don't care, but my own, anecdotal experience is all the evidence I require. You see, when I was expelled from first grade for being disruptive (due to not having been diagnosed as being nearsighted to the point that I was legally blind), my mother undertook to teach me to read at home. In less than a month, I went from not even knowing the alphabet to reading at an eighth-grade level. Much of that was due to her using the phonics+phonemics approach, a roughly equal part can be credited to her choice of Dr. Suess, rather than the achingly-dull Dick and Jane books, as my primer. (When we exhausted his catalogue, she introduced me to the Reader's Digest, instead.) Within 30 days, from a standing start, I had read my first Tom Swift, Jr. novel, and embarked on a lifelong love affair with reading - especially science fiction, but also history, biographies, science and technology, and, as Robert A. Heinlein put it, "words in a line" in general.
So, please, by all means, pray continue to explain how phonics has been "discredited" for decades. You ignorance of the subject is simply fascinating.
Wait, what's the antonym for "fascinating" ... ?
Check out my novel.