The first site I visited for my blog-post reaction for this week was the Washington Post Camera Works  site. The site’s sole purpose is to tell stories using little more than visual media. When the site opens there is a link to the top-story, or most recent story, followed by links to numerous other stories that are listed below. Each link will take you to a series of photographs in the form of slide shows and flipbooks on the given topic (in some cases video features are available). The slide shows and flipbooks come in many different styles (scrolling slide shows and numbered ones) and cover a wide-range of topics from the presidential race to the Washington Redskins to the World Series and Jennifer Hudson-family murder mystery. There’s a link on the left-hand side of the page that breaks the pictures into categories (i.e. politics, arts & living, nation, world, etc.) The number of pictures used to tell each story seems to vary but twenty pictures is about the average. Most of the pictures include a caption or short explanation of what is taking place in each picture as the action and the storyline progress. Links are also made available beneath each slideshow that will take you to a full-story on the topic and to other related content. I found the site quite entertaining, useful, and well put together. It was easy for me to find what I was looking for on the site and sometimes pictures can tell a better story than the largest quantity of words, especially when it comes to a lot of what’s going on in the world today in foreign countries and on distant battlefields. The slide show titled “Eyes on the World” was one of the most fascinating of the examples. The slide show includes 23 pictures from all over the world explaining events from the past week. The captions are very important in these instances since the topic is quite broad.

The MSNBC Multimedia page is similar to the Washington Post site in that it covers numerous topics news, entertainment, sports, travel, science and technology, etc., but it’s designed differently. The topics are broken down into separate sections on the site (with as many as 14 stories in each section) rather than being listed on the side of the page. The actual slide shows are just the same as the Washington Post page, coming in various forms and quantities with captions explaining what is taking place in the picture. One of the slide shows I viewed lacked a legitimate storyline but it was certainly good viewing. The slide show included nothing but pictures of NFL cheerleaders from this past weekend’s game. Pictures include captions such as “A Houston Texans cheerleader performs during play against the Detroit Lions” in this wonderful image, and “Abigail Klein of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders performs during a game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers at Texas Stadium.” Such explanations aren’t as necessary for these images as they are for hard news stories.