Lessons learned from The Big Picture blog at the Boston Globe

A year ago Alan Taylor created a photo blog for the Boston Globe, The Big Picture, and he is taking a look back at its success and shortcomings.

Taylor wasn’t prepared for how successful the blog would become. I’m not sure if anyone predicted that the daily photo blog that tells powerful stories from around the world would become so popular. But The Big Picture really has resonated with people, and it’s the kind of powerful storytelling that is made possible with the Internet.

This is the kind of feature that many news organizations could be doing. The Globe is using Getty Images, Reuters and other third-party photographers for this feature.

In addition, this is the kind of feature that local news organizations could be doing at least weekly, if not daily. People love photos. This blog is a testament to how powerful the stories are that can be told with photos:

I know that it’s not me, Alan Taylor they are all interested in – it’s the story, the photographs, the “what will it be this time?”, the virtual travelogue, the amazing, the sad – the world, wrapped into one story – 30 or 40 photographs to linger on, react to, wonder about. I take that pretty seriously, and try to handle it with care.

What has gone well:

• Rewarding — Taylor says the blog is “the most fulfilling and rewarding thing I’ve ever done professionally. When I’m compiling an entry, gathering the photographs, trying to fit them into a cohesive story, it can often be a very emotional experience. More than once, I’ve found myself in tears when looking at rough layout of an entry for the first time (that’s always a good sign that the entry will be powerful).”
• Popular — The Big Picture blog is really popular. It has more than 150,000 RSS subscribers, thousands of daily visitors and frequently makes it to the top of Digg and Reddit.

What didn’t go so well

• Comment moderation — It’s time consuming, but worth it. Taylor has personally moderated all 91,000 comments on the blog so far. Maybe the Globe could come up with a better system, but comment moderation is always an issue with a popular blog. With the sensitive nature of some of the content that makes it onto the blog, comment moderation is especially important. The last thing you’d want is for a comment ghetto to mare the power of these images and stories.
• Time consuming — Taylor has other jobs at the Globe to do (his main job is as a Web developer). I don’t think anyone originally envisioned The Big Picture becoming this popular, but it has. Which means Taylor has to spend a lot of extra time on a new project. The Globe, like many papers, is not doing so well. That means that Taylor simply has more work to do now than ever before. The more popular the blog becomes, the more work Taylor has to do.

I hope in the coming year we see more photo blogs like The Big Picture.