Newsweek (and its parent company, The Washington Post Company) made the leap into new media in 1989 when they created a laser disc titled “Upheaval in China,” an interactive piece on the student uprising at Tianamen Square. Since that project, Newsweek has created a half-dozen CD-ROM titles including “Open Roads: Driving the Data Highway,” and its latest title, “A Parent’s Guide to Children’s Software.” Carris, who has served as picture editor for several of the CD-ROM projects, is currently the picture editor for the online edition of Newsweek.

Carris:

The photo-essay pictures that I look for are first of all pictures that Newsweek would publish in their regular magazine if they had the space. Newsweek has its own editorial look and feel and I honor that. As far as the actual image itself, I look for pictures that are really strong, that hold their own with just a short caption. If someone is going to wait for a picture to download, the picture better be good and have something to say. It can’t just be a pretty picture.
Technically speaking, we lose a lot of detail when we put a picture online. If what makes a picture very special is its detail, we can’t use it. Also, if the tonality is very subtle, it won’t show up on the screen. I look for pictures where the action is close up, tighter images as opposed to wider ones. Images don’t necessarily have to be centered. In fact for many images, it is the composition that makes them interesting.

I had a picture the other day that was great. It had won an award for print media, but I couldn’t use it. It was an image of a girl running in Bosnia. She was running toward the camera, and it was a rainy, hazy day with a very white sky and you could actually see all the detail in the earth that she was running on. But you wouldn’t have been able to read it online. A pity because it was a very beautiful image.

Do I think video will replace still images when the bandwidth gets greater? No. People said that when television first came out it would get rid of radio-- and it didn’t. I think still photography will always offer people something that they can’t get any other way.