Photographs and graphics can tell stories. For some stories a photograph is essential, and in some instances a photograph is all you need. In most every case, for example, a photograph of people on the Lawn on a nice, autumn day will tell the story of the weather and how people at the University responded to it better than a print story will. With a digital platform, The Cavalier Daily staff has the ability to have as many photographs or graphics as it likes without worrying about the confines of newsprint. But those photographs and graphics should be helpful and do more than fill space, and the digital versions of them shouldn’t be limited by the print version.
News graphics, especially, should be informative in ways text is not. Otherwise, they are at best filler and at worst a distraction from the point of the article. Sites like Vox, The Upshot at the New York Times and Five Thirty Eight are examples of publications working to create new, dynamic visual ways to show information. Their graphics are often richly textured and give the reader a way to understand information in a way that simply reading might not get across. They also use things like simple tables when it seems effective or skip the graphics altogether sometimes. It’s worth pausing for a moment to recognize that those are all multi-million dollar efforts. The Cavalier Daily has had mixed results recently with graphics and photographs.
A cover story on competition to gain membership in various groups on Grounds ran in the October 2nd print issue of The Cavalier Daily. Two graphics accompanied the story: what looks like rock climbers ascending a bar graph and what looks like a Microsoft Word table. Neither did much to help readers understand the points of the accompanying (very interesting) story. The front-page print graphic had no information at all and the table looked like a random selection of information. I still don’t know what I’m supposed to take from the percentage of applicants who are accepted to specific groups or whether I’m meant to compare the groups in the table. There is information, but the graphic doesn’t help me understand it or connect it effectively to the larger themes and, indeed, the specifics in the story.
Better work can be seen in the housing issue from October 6th. The front page (and the rest of that issue, in fact) looked good in print and the online story had the virtue of clickable blurbs for descriptions of individual housing options. The main graphic, though, was a static image online and offered very little useful information. The embedded map was a nice inclusion, but with no connection to the blurbs the whole page/article ended up feeling like a choose your own adventure info-graphic. It just made no really effective use of the digital options. One of the best uses of the digital space was back in April with the publication of salary information. There’s a good reason that report is linked to at the top of every webpage at The Cavalier Daily.
The photography for The Cavalier Daily is often excellent but also isn’t often used in the digital space differently than in print. Galleries in the Multimedia section of the website are loaded with photographs which are often very similar to one another. I end up feeling like I’m scrolling through pictures on someone’s phone albeit with much higher quality photography. I’d like to see more curating of the galleries to help tell stories. And beyond the photography, there hasn’t been a video uploaded to the multimedia section since April.
Moving to a digital-first format offers opportunities for more interesting graphics, more creative photography and richer multimedia content. Indeed, if media trends hold these are all essential for gaining and holding a reader base. The Cavalier Daily needs to figure out how to consistently rise to it’s highest level in this area.
Christopher Broom is the public editor for The Cavalier Daily’s. He can be reached at publiceditor@cavalierdaily.com or on Twitter at @cdpubliceditor.
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