One of the myriad ways in which online journalism beats old-fashioned print to a pulp is slideshows.
At first, they were the domain of tacky celeb-obsessive sites like Sky Showbiz and handbag.com, with infinite photo galleries on urgent topics like ‘Splits We Want to Undo‘ and ‘Madonna’s Changing Faces‘.
But the low-attention-span, lunchbreak-friendly nature of click-thru photo galleries – basically online picture books – has proved so successful that serious websites are hijacking the medium for themselves. Guardian Unlimited, in its usual precocious manner, adopted the device pretty early and now use it to a variety of effects.
I quite liked yesterday’s ‘Tears‘, although it’s interesting to wonder how much more intellectually acceptable this kind of slideshow becomes when it’s courtesy the Guardian and not, say, Sky Showbiz.
Far better is their gallery “The Big Picture: Climate Change” which includes some truly stunning pictures – like the penguins shown here on an eroded blue iceberg – annotated with useful facts and enlightening comment.
Slate is perhaps most ambitious with their photo galleries, as signalled by the fact that they title them “slideshow essays”. But why not be ambitious? As “Is Takashi Murakami Japan’s Andy Warhol – or its Walt Disney?”
proves, when slideshows are done well, they become nothing less than a whole new way of telling stories.
