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May 18, 2009
Ye Olde Media
Real size.
On the USA Today blog, reported, interviewed, and edited (?) by Anthony Breznican.
Scor-f----ing-sese.
As you all know, streaming video the size of classic You Tube makes me nuts... and if I were going to sit through 30 minutes of my interviews, I would want to see it in a bigger size, with higher quality, which is why I post so big.
BUT... the most read newspaper in America can't afford the bandwidth for a 2 minute 30 second video to be viewable?
Yeah, you can blow it up to full screen, but the video is too low-bandwidth to look good at that size... even if you don't, as I do, get just a partial image in one corner of the screen.
This is an issue on the entire blog. All the images are 200x150. Why? At least the photos enlarge when you click on them... but in a ton of different sizes. Pretty much every image is a different size. Where is the stylebook for this in a company the size of USA Today? Every once in a while, in the course of my daily work here, I get that some image will only be available in a reduced size for whatever reason. But I will bet you that the still frame of Rachel Weisz from Agora did not arrive on anyone's desktop at 395px × 257px. And when it enlarges, it is on an entire page by itself, so they could easily be going 800px high before most web pages would automatically resize them. Of course, the Getty Images pix they bought are too big for the pages... weird.
Look... if anyone understands how daunting all this can be, it's me. It's taken me more than 2 years to come up with a consistent format for posting DP/30 (not to mention 3 names). And I am still catching up on standardizing the backlog. But the big papers should understand just how valuable their access and content is, even if it's not Cahiers du Cinema.
I mean, I still don't understand why if you have First Look images from big movies, like Sherlock Holmes, you build them out at 677 X 445... though I do see that the USA Today web space content standard seems to be 1000px wide and they want to fit banner and copy space in that, so okay... but why not build a bigger image for those who might obsess on the materials, which is why you fight to get a First Look, right?
I don't mean to be a bully, though that would be hard for little ol' me to do in commenting on big machine USA Today. But step it up and add some serious structure. It takes exactly the same amount of work... and the results will be so much better!
How hard would it be to have a regularly updated flip book of images from that blog... everything built for a 1000x700 page... some things too small to blow up, but most things having to be scaled down a little... last image first... stamped USA Today somewhere... easily downloaded... easy. They have the technology. They use it all the time. And it makes such a difference between the online presence being someplace you HAVE to go sometimes because they get so many exclusives and someplace you WANT to go, day after day, week after week, year after year.
And get Scorsese out of that little box. He's already tiny. You're gonna give him a f---ing complex.
Posted by dpoland at May 18, 2009 02:42 PM
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