Earlier this month the BBC News Picture Editor Phil Coomes joined the ever growing ranks of BBC bloggers with his own: Viewfinder
The blog sets out to discuss photography on the BBC News website and more widely on the subject of photojournalism and photography. Coomes himself is a photographer, studying at the BA Photography course at the University of Westminster under Tom Ang, who you may remember from the BBC TV series A digital picture of Britain
The BBC has, in my opinion, long shunned away from news photography which is understandable given it’s long history geared towards television and radio. However as one of the most trafficked news websites in the world and as more news is consumed online the BBC has lagged behind by miles with it’s use of press photography.
Granted it has improved in recent years with it’s new larger image and headline when a big story is splashed on the front page (see above) and more recently it’s much improved galleries, which broke the ancient constraints of the old 465 x 300 px slideshows.
There are still some problems with the new galleries, captions over photographs may be a pretty and efficient use of space if you are a web developer, but not much good if you want to look at a photograph and read the caption at the same time without ruining the aesthetics of both.
Another bugbear of mine is the lack of credits on images, usually it’s an AP, PA or Getty credit over the image, again something that irks the photography purist in me. But is it really that hard to properly credit a photographer? If they can credit every member of the production team on TV and occasionally the journalist who wrote the story online surely they can find the space for a credit for the photographer. Even the ‘Have Your Say’ comments get proper attribution.
A shining example of news photography online is the New York Times, whose stories have images over the full width of the article and often additional images for the story which can be viewed larger. Most importantly they are fully credited, even when they are from the wire agencies.
Closer to home the Guardian also plays photographs over the full width of the column and credits them properly. The Daily Mail uses images and graphics so heavily on it’s articles that if there were any more there would be nothing left but the headline. And of course there is the Boston Globe Big Picture blog, which plays images at a screen-busting 990px across.
Clearly little value is held for the still image at BBC News, apart from it’s frequent celebration of meaningless mediocrity with it’s ‘Your Pictures’ galleries which serve little other than free-content filler and a fulfilment of equally meaningless audience participation.
BBC News has an annual budget of £350 million, but from the look of it’s shockingly sparse local news sites you wouldn’t know it (a subject worthy of a blog post of it’s own). I know of one professional photojournalist who was offered a meagre £15 for a photo, he declined their offer.
Last night Suzanne Breen, Northern Ireland Editor of the (Dublin) Sunday Tribune, flew in to the NUJ headqaurters on Grays Inn Road to talk to members about the case being brought against her by the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) under the Terrorism Act (2000) to reveal her sources in the Real IRA.
