dummied

Database Journalism in the darkroom

At a glance

This entry was written on September 22, 2006.

The entry prior to this is entitled Zenphoto goes (relatively) big time.

The entry following this is entitled Going Indy.

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Database journalism, it's a big word (or two actually) and all the rage these days. Everybody's abuzz about storing stories in structured formats and then repurposing/reformatting them down the road.

But what about photos? Can they not benefit from structured metadata formats as well?

How about sorting photos by community?

By sport?

By date?

By section?

By team or school?

By traditional galleries?

Or what about sorting by all of them once.

And what if you get all of these galleries without having to lift a finger?

That's the beast I've helped unleashed at LoHud.com. Our new database gallery system,which has been an all-summer project spawned from our award-winning U.S. Open site.

As I wait for the hosting situation to become more settled (we're currently sharing with a lot of other sections of the site), I'm also slowly reaching the system's tenacles into the site proper. Blocks of specially-sorted thumbnails are appearing on the front, naturally, but also on community pages, special event themes and my redesigned Sports and High School Football fronts.

I'm also going through the site willy-nilly attaching the galleries to stories.

It'sallpossible because we took the time to decide on a database structure and our photography staff has been diligently tagging everything with dates and towns and teams and sports and sections.

And we're doing it all using the existing IPTC fields our photographers are used to filling out with captions and headlines.

It's also taken a dedication on the part of the photography staff management to hold very little back. Very rarely is there a sense of "Shouldn't we be saving this for the print edition?"

Everyone is gung-ho.

And that includes visitors to the site. Counting the photo overlays (which, since they have an ad on them [not my idea, for the record], tend to count in my book), the galleries are quickly becoming the second-most visited section of our site ... behind only our front page.

And we've only been pushing the system strongly for a week now.

The scary thing is, this is just a base to build off of from where I sit.

I've already added a slideshow mode (example) to go with the slick lightbox default mode and a low-fi mode should also be forthcoming shortly. We attach game photo galleries to the scores in the football scoreboard, sometimes before we have a score from the game.

We can still do traditional galleries, but because we have a structured data format for all of metadata, we also get dozens of galleries without lifting a finger.

Daily galleries, sports galleries, team galleries, game galleries, town galleries.

And they all exist at once and they all overlap and interconnect.

And the bigger this gets — in volume of photos especially — the better it's going to get.