The Boston Globe’s Big Picture blog is one of most compelling photoblogs around. It tells stories by featuring amazing and huge (990px) photos put in context by a paragraph of caption text. The format is nothing new, but the interesting thing is that this blog is coming from a traditional newspaper website which can show the full resolution snaps from their AP, Getty and Reuters sources.
If you haven’t already seen it – take a look at the Bushfires in Victoria, Australia, The 2009 Dakar Rally, Venice under water, Mumbai under attack, Air Racing and the archives.
Alan Taylor is the developer at the Boston Globe who decided to make the new pages, inspired from the Life and National Geographic magazines his parents always used to have around the house.
When asked if there was any resistance to the idea, Alan said in an interview at Waxy.org:
Not really any resistance, but a lot of “hmm, well, we need to check on it.” Mostly things to do with licenses and contracts with image providers. I put together a few mockups that look almost exactly like the final product and shopped it around. A few people loved it, went crazy for it… Others weren’t immediately sold, but I asked for a chance, and I got it.
I have an advantage in that my main role is as a developer here, so I could build all my own templates, format my own style, and so on. I sort of bulldozed some things through though, like extra width, few ads, and I made it simple internally by doing it mostly on my own, no requests for development time, marketing or promotion. After the legal questions were settled, I was free to try it out. It took off fast.
What ideas are you holding onto that could be out in the real world, happening?
By Ross Hill - February 16th, 2009 at 10:30am with 2,175 views - alan taylor ap boston globe dakar rally getty life national geographic reuters
