These stupid, useless photo galleries are stupid, useless
By William M. Hartnett on Sep 24, 2009 in featured, newspapers
If you follow me on Twitter you know that since Tuesday night I’ve been highly critical of a photo gallery that appears on numerous Tribune Company sites. The gallery contains photos of poorly parked cars found on and downloaded from Flickr, and, when available, captions written by the original Flickr users. (Did you catch the part where I said the gallery features pictures of poorly parked cars? That’s right, poorly parked cars.)
Clearly, the gallery is nothing more than an inane way to drum up meaningless page views that earn effectively nothing, but I’ll get back to that. I had two narrower, more immediate criticisms of this particular example of a Stupid Tribune Gallery™. First, while each picture included the Flickr username of its owner, neither the name nor the photo itself linked back to the original photo page on Flickr. That changed early Wednesday morning, and the username under each picture now links to the owner’s Flickr photo page.
The bigger problem was that nearly all of the 50-plus photos in the gallery as of Tuesday evening were licensed under the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs Creative Commons license. That’s non-commercial as in, “You may not use this work for commercial purposes.” The gallery has been significantly revised several times since then, but a handful of pictures with the non-commercial use provision remain as I write this.
While there is not a single, all-encompassing definition of what constitutes commercial use, the overwhelming view of both content creators and users is that advertising, such as the multiple ad positions on all of the pages that feature the bad parking photo gallery, qualifies.
I tracked down some of the original photos used in the bad parking package and created this Flickr gallery. At least one of the users whose photo was used in the Tribune gallery was not happy about it, but his picture remained there for an entire day.
In July my former colleague Will Sullivan wrote on Poynter Online about Tribune’s use of Creative Commons-licensed photos from Flickr. The commercial use of non-commercial Creative Commons-licensed photos was not raised in Sullivan’s column, but Tribune Interactive’s content director noted that the company’s “Awkward Tombstones” gallery had been a top 10 traffic driver. (Did you catch the part where I said the gallery features pictures of awkward tombstones? That’s right, awkward tombstones. Also note that the gallery does not link to the original pages on Flickr.)
And that’s the real issue, isn’t it? We all know Tribune is not alone among media companies in packaging utter nonsense such as famous bears or bad tattoos into galleries for the sole purpose of generating page views. And we all know that those page views are empty, meaningless and almost entirely devoid of sustainable monetary value.
As recently mentioned by Time, my own employer doubled its page view haul when it introduced one of the early mug shot photo galleries. Obviously, digital revenue did not double, as any of my co-workers laid off in the most recent round of cutbacks three weeks ago can attest. (The need for more meaningful metrics for local online news sites is a separate post in itself, and, fortunately, Joe Murphy has already written it.)
So why do it? Why stumble, lurch and flail so thoughtlessly, so shortsightedly? Why ignorantly and brazenly appropriate the work of others who maintain at least a default position of not allowing it to be used for a commercial purpose? Why hasten your own irrelevance by posting material such as underage high school girls wrestling in chocolate syrup or well-endowed, bikini-clad school teachers?
We are all ashamed of the sometimes vile, often offensive, always inane refuse that gets packaged like putrid factory-farmed waste meat into meaningless page view-inflating photo galleries on all too many of our newspaper websites.
Why do we exist? What do we do that justifies our continued existence as going concerns? Newspapers and other traditional news outlets, like any organization, should be able to answer those questions in as little as a single sentence, and strive in confident, unwavering accordance with that statement to decide their own fate.
Attempting to answer those questions in a way that accommodates these idiotic photo galleries, on the other hand, would require many paragraphs of equivocation, and page after page of impotent self-justification.
Let’s choose to be something worth fighting for, or let’s just give up right now.
Greg | Sep 24, 2009 | Reply
Great post. Don’t forget this slide show, which I’ll be darned if isn’t an annual tradition:
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/health/orl-peta-protest-photos,0,4153242.photogallery
This one is global, but the ones I’d originally seen (galleries of similar “news” events in Fort Lauderale one year and then the next) were local.
William M. Hartnett | Sep 24, 2009 | Reply
Naked PETA babes must be part of that sacred public service journalism that we like to pretend constitutes even a significant fraction of our total output.
Will Sullivan | Sep 24, 2009 | Reply
Are AP photos allowed to be posted years after their publish date? IANAL, but I’ve always heard that you’re allowed two weeks as an AP member and then you’ve got to take it down. (They don’t really enforce it much, obviously)… but some of those AP photos in these galleries that are years old. I’m not sure if that’s allowed per the agreement.
Rick | Sep 25, 2009 | Reply
When used appropriately (photos from a legitimate source, related news … etc), they can yield both pageviews and be smart and useful.
But when editors just don’t care – you get photos of poorly parked cars.
Silient Bob | Sep 25, 2009 | Reply
The media organisation I work has posted a couple of galleries this week featuring photographs from flickr that are tagged “non-commercial” or “all rights reserved”.
AFAIK as I know they have not obtained permission for them and seem to feel that crediting the author is enough.
I just feel so mad. If the situation was reversed then my company would have the lawyers sending out emails straight away.
Tully! | Sep 26, 2009 | Reply
It’s not just dumb to grab photos specifically for non-commercial use off Flickr, it’s INCREDIBLY lazy. You can do a search for photos that people have OK’d for commercial use on Flickr.
Matt | Sep 29, 2009 | Reply
I don’t mind the mug shot things if they’re done right (I like St. Pete’s basically). But Flikr galleries are just innane. And boosting gallery traffic makes no sense anyway. As you said it doesn’t even make any money no matter the number of page views.
Teejeff | Oct 1, 2009 | Reply
I applaud your point and the underlying issues that allow the digital press to put up this rubbish. Having missed out on every technical revolution in the information-via-Internet era, newspapers are reduced to site stat rolling beasts devoid of content. I am not a journo, but I am a scared citizen worried that the fourth estate will be reduced to babes, boobs and weird vids and photos to support it’s substandard product. The only thing missing today is that the revenue does not fully support the biz, but that day is coming.
Fernando Diaz | Oct 27, 2009 | Reply
I understand your point. Half-naked girls and cats, which are featured on your blog, or bikini-clad skippers are pure ploys for traffic. How do you think Huffington Post makes 40 percent or more of it’s traffic? Not with eloquent posts from actors and activists. And this is where I think you miss the forest for the trees.
Photo galleries are the medium. And by photos and galleries, we’re really just talking power point presentations embedded on web pages for browsers. You can use this click-through format to generate sensible, clear and authoritative reporting. You use the medium for impactful journalism. So far, the Business Insider is doing this exceptionally well. Here’s an example: http://www.businessinsider.com/50-cent-empire-banking-on-your-popularity-2009-9
You can apply that “technique” to everything from an audit to the city budget. Next time don’t bash, provide a solution.
William M. Hartnett | Oct 27, 2009 | Reply
Fernando, I will proudly continue to bash stupid photo galleries, because the solution is simple: DON’T MAKE THEM ANYMORE. Or are we really counting on galleries of underage girls wrestling in chocolate syrup to generate meaningful revenue? That’s revenue, not traffic.
In this case there is no forest to miss while gazing at trees with big tits and little clothing. You see the link you provided as an exceptional example of using a gallery-style format to present information, but it’s clearly nothing more than a gimmick to squeeze superfluous pageviews out of paper-thin content. Far from being motivated by good interface design, the gallery is simply a product of a deeply flawed business model that values ephemeral traffic over quality audience and sustainable long-term revenue.
Joe Germuska | Oct 28, 2009 | Reply
I am happy to see you criticizing stupid photo galleries, and criticizing empty strategies for inflating ad revenue. But that Business Insider gallery uses javascript, so probably isn’t inflating pageviews.
William M. Hartnett | Oct 28, 2009 | Reply
Fair point, Joe, but no matter how you build a gallery, the stuff you dump into it still has to justify what the user experiences as a multi-page presentation, what with the clicking and all.