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Online Journalism News

Local newspaper snappers turn to blogging site to accommodate photo slideshows

Posted: 25/10/07 By: Oliver Luft
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Photographers at the Croydon Advertiser launched an off-site blog to house their photographic slide shows and solve a multimedia-reporting dilemma.

Data storage restrictions meant the website of the South London weekly paper couldn't accommodate the slide shows that its photography department wanted to use to expand its multimedia coverage.

Instead, photographers working with the paper turned to the WordPress blogging platform to host its presentations, linking the main site to the new galleries.

"It was a quick IT solution, we had a lot of trouble, administratively, getting server space so we thought it would be easier to set it up externally and link to it from the Advertiser site," David Berman, chief photographer, told Journalism.co.uk.

"It was going to take too long to get our slide shows up [on the newspaper website] so we created Sit Bonzo."

Although only a team of three staff photographers, the paper launched its Sit Bonzo site in December last year (the paper has since been bought by Northcliffe Media from Trinity Mirror) on a budget, Berman said, of £300 for microphones and audio recording equipment.

The photographic team builds its projects using Sound Slide software and edits audio on a Mac's inbuilt Garage Band feature.

"The reason we went down the Sound Slides route is that before Christmas our editor asked us to look into doing video," Berman added.

"I think generally the standard of video in local newspapers is pretty poor. So I thought leave TV to the TV guys, we'll do what we do best and that's to take pictures.

"The only skill that as photographers we have had to learn is to capture audio on regular assignment.

"Learning how to make a video broadcast is infinitely more difficult than learning how to take audio.

"We're good at photography, but we're not TV journalists. The editor wanted multimedia content and that's what we delivered to him."

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