The Week/Month in Photos

REUTERS/David Mdzinarishvili

Echoes of the Great Depression AP/Seth Wenig

In the past few years, popular news sites like Yahoo news gained much popularity with their photo slideshows "The Week in Pictures". In a similar vain to this, Reuters.com has a similar application on their website, only it is a “Pictures of the Month” option. Both sites have several images that highlight the week and month’s most important headlines, and both have the advantage of allowing the viewer to cycle through the photos. Yahoo posted 12 photos this week, while Reuters.com posted 52 photos this past month. Reuters is loaded with photos of the Olympic Games in Beijing, and has several photos of isolations of people and their faces, making them very powerful. Yahoo’s website tends to focus less on people and more so on settings, so I give the edge to Reuters there.

YAHOO

First off, it’s impressive to note that the home page of yahoo has their weeks in photos dating back to May of 2006. One of my favorite photos is one of stockbrokers on Wall Street stressing out about dropping stocks. In this particular photo, it is centered around a particularly distraught man in the middle.

As I mentioned before, the biggest flaw in many of these pictures is a lack of human contact. While their photo was a long shot of the train wreck, MSNBC had a much more powerful photo of a woman getting pulled form the wreckage.

REUTERS

The photos for the month of August were predominately ones from the Beijing Olympics, but there are a handful of powerful photos that show just how brilliant some of their photographers are. The most powerful one that I found is below of an injured woman in Georgia from the Russian attacks. The following is a list of pros that make it better then the yahoo website.

• The slideshow is operational by simply clicking on the photo itself, where the yahoo website is only operational through the timeline down below.
• These photos are focusing primarily on close ups of human bodies and faces
• They have a stop motion picture that is very creative and interesting.