Writing for a Visual Medium - Lauren Zima

I found the poynter article very helpful - especially the ideas about keeping writing succinct and the "story in a sentence" concept. We can see these ideas in daily news coverage.

In our studies of journalism at Mizzou, I think we sometimes we ignore the more frivolous, but popular, ares of journalism such as entertainment journalism. Personally, I follow celebrity news (as well as other news) daily, and there's a lot of money to be made in that realm. People magazine is the #1 magazine in the U.S. The point is, we ignore this area of journalism, but it can be a difficult area to write for (writing must be snappy and clever) and some of the best writing for visual mediums is found in entertainment journalism because it is such a visual field. On people.com for example, every day reporters are given new photos and/or video of celebrities to put on the site/in the magazine. They have to come up with short quips that provide context about what the celebrity is doing as well as information about the celebrity's current life. Here's one example from a photo of actor Patrick Dempsey:

DRESSED TO IMPRESS
Looking sharp! His Grey's Anatomy character may be a mess, but Patrick Dempsey lives up to his McDreamy title, suiting up for a photo shoot in Los Angeles on Saturday.

As the article touched on, I think the key to writing for a visual medium is to add context to the visual in an interesting way. There's no point in writing if it doesn't add anything to the photo. In this instance, the caption could've simply read "Patrick Dempsey in Los Angeles", but the reader learned from the in-depth caption, and the caption kept the reader's interest because it was succinct and fun.