Picture perfect at the London Olympics

MEDIA & MARKETING: EVERYONE WHO vaulted atop the London 2012 media-fest has something to miss in this most dispiritingly podium-free of weeks – the definitive expertise of Michael Johnson, the easy authority of Clare Balding, the helicopter video-feed of crowd-lined cityscapes as sticky road races unfolded. But broadcasters weren't the only people having fun at work.

Step forward, the sports photographers. In Olympic season, the picture was the lead story for newspapers, and individual photographers who won praise for capturing moments of split-second grace, explosive power or eye-pleasing symmetry made sure to stress that their profession was about more than standing in the right place at the right time.

On Poynter.org, AP photojournalist Greg Bull explained how he had watched gymnast Gabby Douglas (top right) perform on the beam five times during the US Olympic trials and so he knew precisely the point in her routine that he wanted to capture long before he arrived at the North Greenwich Arena. Bull's photograph of "flying squirrel" Douglas leaping to her highest point off the beam, splitting her limbs and throwing her head to the ceiling, the vastness of the arena surrounding her, was praised for its beauty.

Similarly, Reuters’ Luke MacGregor, who claimed no astronomical expertise, described how he had lain in wait for three evenings on a mission to photograph a full moon aligning in an artistic triangle with Olympic rings suspended from Tower Bridge. Elsewhere, the Guardian’s Dan Chung was assigned the task of documenting the action with a smartphone in an exercise seemingly intended to prove that it’s not just expensive equipment, or luck, that elevates the professionals above the citizen journalist masses.

London 2012 had its fair share of pricey gadgets, of course, with scuba-diving specialists monitoring a reef of glass-housed underwater cameras and news agency picture editors climbing 60m-tall pillars in the Olympic Stadium to install robot cameras. The addition of the latter was years in the planning, but worth it given the popularity of their overhead images with British picture editors eager to patriotically reflect the pomp-and-splendour of their home games.

Indeed, while news organisations frantically raced to assemble photographs into the online galleries that so delightfully drive digital traffic, a dramatic shift to visual journalism was simultaneously taking place in print. After all, a good photograph can be made remarkable through inspired publication design, while a technically amazing photograph may seem ordinary on the page if the editorial context is badly judged.

My own front-page design winner was the Times (of London), which opted for elegant, simple wraparounds throughout.

In one typical example, boxing champion Nicola Adams was pictured on the right of the frame, thereby taking pride of place on the front of the paper. The crowd behind the ring was blacked out, while the white-font headline “The Right Stuff” was placed under her attacking glove. Turn to the back of the wraparound cover – or the left of the photo – and you found her defeated opponent, Mary Kom, awaiting Adams’s punch.

Synchronised swimmers in perfect harmony, track cyclists in sharp focus and sprinters chasing each other around the bend also became the subjects of stirring Times covers. The Olympics didn’t mark the debut of these wraparounds. After last year’s royal wedding, when all but one of its competitors opted for the traditional (expected, boring) balcony kiss shot, the Times was alone in choosing the more unexpected close-up of the couple driving on the Mall in an Aston Martin.

For picture editors, London 2012 must have seemed like all their royal weddings had come at once. Although it did it best, the Times was not alone in deciding that a spectacular image of athletic glory blown out to the edges was the best marketing for newspapers’ Olympics packages, displacing from the front page the flights of fancy of colour writers and the emotive analysis of sports correspondents.

The Daily Telegraph, the Independent on Sunday and the Daily Mail all ran “The Greatest” headlines against full-page images – the only difference in the papers’ shared desire to miminise their front-page word count was the fact that they bestowed this honour upon Usain Bolt, Mo Farah and Chris Hoy respectively. Full front-page images are rare in the Irish market, although the Irish Examiner did silhouette its masthead and its headline against a large shot of Katie Taylor kissing her medal, keeping its written account of her “historic day” strictly below the fold.

Is this greater prioritisation of photojournalism a smart sales tactic? The circulation figures of British newspapers are released monthly, so the question of which, if any, publications enjoyed an Olympic bounce will soon be known. Still, it will be difficult to pinpoint any uplift on specific design choices and not the story of London 2012 itself.

It also remains to be seen whether the Olympic picture extravaganza marks a longer-term preference for magazine-like concept covers. If it does, newspapers that dispense with staff photographers and trusted freelancers and rely on commonly available wire services will be left at a disadvantage when it comes to those picture scoops.

If I had one misgiving, it’s the fanciful idea that a full front-page image turns a printed paper into a “souvenir edition”. Everyone knows that newspapers are perishable products.