Why bother with photos?

Well, for starters, when you write a story for print, wouldn’t you rather that it always have an image attached to it?

In our current, web-surfing world, readers can sometimes scan upwards of 100 websites a day. Photos help to quickly orient you to the content on a site, and make you that much more likely to read what the writer has to say. They break up long chunks of text, and help make your post more accessible.

My goal is have some photo or image (or video screencast, in this post’s case) in every post I write. It’s easier than you think. Make friends with Digicol and AP and other Gannett websites. For more detail on what photos are and are not permissible, check out these photo guidelines, originally written by Larry Nylund at The Journal News (a Gannett paper in Westchester, and my blogging alma mater).

But assuming you’ve got a photo ready to go, this screencast will show you how to add it to a post.