Last month, a good friend and mentor pointed to this New York Times photo gallery of “One in Eight Million,” a beautifully produced photo essay about a slice of life by the Times online staff. He wrote:
“This kind of on-line content is why the NY Times will thrive. And the lack of this kind of content is why other newspaper websites will be distant memories in the not-too-distant future.”
My response to him was some rather harsh disagreement that such beautifully produced, and expensive content — especially given away free with no ad support — is exactly why newspapers were in trouble.
My suggestion to is to look instead at what the Austin-American Statesman did on Sunday along the similar idea and at virtually no cost. Dubbed: “Our Day in the Heat,” the Statesman instead relied on crowd-sourced content from the region to get a true slice of community life during an especially trying heat wave.
Austin-Statesman reader Shawnna Donop submitted this photo of a squirrell trying to beat the heat on her back porch.
Using the free social media platform Posterous, Statesman readers simply e-mailed photos that were easily approved or rejected by the Statesman online staff. The gallery is not as polished as the Times’ black-and-white Photoshopped pieces of art, nor does is want to be. Frankly it’s more fun and full of whimsy, and cost virtually nothing to produce.
Unlike some typical newspaper photo galleries, this one charged readers with a specific task and turned them into de facto sources. For example, Syracuse.com has a gallery of New York State Fair pictures taken by readers, but the interface to upload them is clunky and there’s no overriding theme except the Fair. A better play would have been to “Take a picture of the most relaxed person at the State Fair” or “Find the most look-alike couple” on the boardway or “the best sundown at the State Fair picture” or some such list of categories.
Soon enough, you’ll be seeing more crowd-sourced audio and photo essays appearing on local news sites as the commoditization of coverage reduces expenses and allows more voices to be heard.
Not convinced that’s a bad thing.
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