If you follow the big-format photo blogs like the Boston Globe's "The Big Picture," the Wall Street Journal's "Photo Journal," or the Denver Post’s "Captured," you've probably noticed a difference in how they are edited. "The Big Picture" entries focus on a single topic and present roughly 30 related images; recent posts have covered the International Space Station, Dubai and the United Arab Emirates, microscopic imaging, and Afghanistan's Korengal Valley. "Captured," which was inspired by "The Big Picture," also uses this single-topic format. At times the WSJ "Photo Journal" will run a commissioned photo story—Joe Fornabaio's portraits from the Democratic National Convention or Thomas Dworzak's photographs from Georgia during the recent war, for instance—but generally the "Photo Journal" features their "Pictures of the Day" (POTD) entries, which are just that: a collection of the best and most striking images that WSJ photo editors find on the wires.

We asked WSJ director of photography Jack Van Antwerp, "The Big Picture" editor Alan Taylor, and "Captured" editor Meghan Lyden to describe their editing processes.

In an e-mail, Taylor writes: "I am constantly browsing through images and subjects (world news feeds, news image feeds), looking at what is available, current, and interesting. When I see an image that catches my eye, I look a few steps deeper: 'Does it hold up well at 990 pixels?'; 'Are there enough photos of similar quality to create a narrative?' "

Relying on the wires for 90 percent of his images, Taylor says that he's been most successful when he lets available images dictate the topic. "Any time I've chosen a topic first, then pursued an appropriate set of images, it's been very difficult" he says. "It's so much easier to spend my time scanning photos, waiting for an opportunistic story to strike me based on what I see."

Taylor believes that building a narrative is the most effective use of the imagery he has at his fingertips through the Globe. "In my opinion, there is far more benefit to focusing on one story and really trying to present it well than there is to presenting a bunch of really good, but unrelated photos," he says.

Inspired by "The Big Picture" to develop a big-format blog for Denver Post readers, Meghan Lyden, the Post’s multimedia photo editor, adopted a similar approach to Taylor’s. “When you visit a news web site, you might get two or three photos on the article page,” says Lyden via e-mail. “I always wanted more. When I would look at some photo galleries on different news web sites, being a photo editor, I could tell I was seeing a gallery put together by a web producer and the images weren't necessarily telling a story—they were not edited and just kind of thrown together.”
Much like Taylor, Lyden relies on the wires, and she also sees all of the photos shot by Post photographers that don’t make the print edition. “If I get a great, interesting set of photos from one of our photographers, I try to use those first because I think the denverpost.com audience would have special interest in seeing something from their area.”

“I like telling a story and it's a good exercise for me too as a photo editor, to look at all these photos and narrow them down to a package” says Lyden. “In the age of shrinking print space, I think mainly the blog just offers us a new way to use great photos to tell a story, and that's what we love to do as photo editors.”

Jack Van Antwerp says that the focus for WSJ.com’s “Pictures of the Day,” which runs on its "Photo Journal" blog, is to have readers expect a "visual feast" when they click through.

Before the WSJ.com redesign, POTD, which was published under a different name at the time, tried to peg to the articles that appeared on WSJ.com on a given day. The problem, says Van Antwerp, was that the photos were really boring 80 percent of the time. “We turned [the concept] around and said, ‘Let’s make this the best photos that we can find out there on a daily basis,’ ” says Van Antwerp.

He adds that in a perfect world, more of the WSJ's single-topic slide shows and commissioned photo stories would run in the "Photo Journal," and manpower is the only thing holding that back. Van Antwerp notes, however, that it's difficult to judge whether the POTD or narrative slide shows will be more popular with readers in this big-format presentation. "We don't have a perfect way to measure because [POTD and the traditional single-topic slide shows] aren't promoted equally." However, he notes that when POTD gets promoted on the WSJ.com home page, it gets great traffic. "When it's just kind of hanging around in the world pages and that sort of thing, it does really well, but our thematic [slide shows], when they're embedded into a specific article, they definitely have much greater traffic."

As readers we now get the benefit of the focused stories on "The Big Picture" and "Captured," and the "Photo Journal"'s "visual feast." As more of these big-format photo blogs become available, it will be interesting to watch which editorial philosophy resonates strongest with readers.