Relations Overseas: Obama's Trip to the Motherland

President Obama traveled to Buckingham Palace to have tea and crumpets with Queen Elizabeth II this past week, setting the stage for Obama’s international relationship with the rest of the world. With Michelle Obama in tow, the president created a new foundation with the other leaders of the G-20 for world peace and leadership. But what I had come to find the most interesting about the whole ordeal, besides the controversial issue of the First Lady returning the gesture of a hug to Her Highness, was the choice of picture presentation that many leading news organizations chose to illustrate the event. The most common photo used to depict the Obamas presentation to the Queen was the following:



I found this picture to be really gaudy and boring, and it barely skims the line of criteria we discussed in class. It meets the bars of aesthetics, but it does not really capture the essence of the significance of this introduction and union of the United States and England. It also meets the “Rule of Thirds,” but, as mentioned, it is quite bland and posed. Although this photo is a feature photo, and not all feature photos are necessarily required to be all that interesting, but I just think that a story of this magnitude would yield a better image, either that captures more emotion, more of the activity, or just something that could give this photo a little kick.

This photo was featured on The Chicago Sun-Times and The New York Post this morning. The layouts of these pages are very similar, with exclamatory headlines pasted across the bottom of the photo. Both make humorous “British” references to slang and other various royal jokes, and both organizations chose to use the photo as (basically) their entire front page. Again, I think that the design elements that these organizations used for their front pages could have been improved.

I know that many editors and publishers are pressed for time and sometimes have to work with what they have, but I still think that the photo selection and general layouts of these pages could have been drastically improved.

G-20 Summit Stories

Possibly the most newsworthy world event going on right now is the G-20 Summit being held in London. Most major newspapers are covering everything from the $1.1 trillion pledged to help IMF, World Bank and the protest going on in the streets to Michelle Obama's mishap of putting her arm around the Queen of England during a photo op.

Each of these stories is very important and very well produced for an online publication. The IMF story uses links and a list to help readers navigate around the website to other stories about the conference. I think the USA Today did a very interesting thing by posting related stories at the very bottom of the page before the reader had to scroll down to continue the story. They are able to do this because they use the inverted pyramid style. The most important information is in the first three graphs of the story. If the reader was satisified they would be able to click on links to find other stories about the summit, if they wanted to continue reading they would just scroll down to find the rest of the story.

The story about the protesting done by msnbc.com had great pictures and a video to go along with the story. This gives the story more than one medium to use. The video does a great job of giving the option of not having to read the story if the person would rather listen to the story than have to spend time reading it.

The last story I found on USA Today was more of a feature story than a hard news story. It was a good way to show there is a lighter side to a meeting that is causing such a global controversy. The story was picked up by American newspapers after it ran in England as a tabloid story. Most of the people shrugged off the breach in protocol.

All the articles used more than one medium to tell the story which is arguably the most important part of online publication design.