I'm not authoritative on the history of photojournalism, but I would make a fast bet than up until the Web, photojournalism was primarily a photo and a caption - the end. Maybe a magazine would have a section for the week's news in photos, but for most news stories, the reader is lucky to get even one black and white photograph per story with just a hint of story from the photojournalist called a caption.
The Web, however, acts as digital steroids for news stories. The reporter can link other information, add video and can have as many pictures as it takes to tell the story. While a lot of innovation is still taking place with photography and the Web, I've watched Jen Friedberg for some time and really like her take photo/audio slide presentations.
Simple slide shows should probably have some sort of template we can use for any ol' variety news story that happens to be visually stunning. But when it comes to more feature driven stories, I think Friedberg's style is something to look at.
Friedberg always offers more than pictures. Quite often she has sound in the background and her pictures will change according to the story told on the soundtrack. But she may also have links, more story to tell and video available as well. These are more feature driven items for a story, but they give the power of well thought design.
If you really want to see something professional and progressive I think visualedge.com may have some inspiration. It is a slide show on cocaine. The basic model is from Flash and it includes pictures and video by selection. This is what happens when Poynter and journalism students get together, and I think what they've done is slick.
While I enjoyed perusing slide shows, I think one of the more useful gems I found for someone who really wants to keep up with what's new in multimedia presentations was a little site called joeweiss.com. I found several presentations here quite fascinating.
My concern for visual presentation on the Web is the inherent download times. People have only so much patience on the Web for even the most stunning display of pictures. I'm guessing 10 seconds is a threshold of patience many happy clickers aren't willing to cross. The growth of highspeed capability helps curb the concern, but a news site is supposed to be for everyone's use.
KUJH-TV's site may or may not need this same line of thought. If our core audience is on campus, then highspeed really isn't an issue. The same applies for students at highschools thousends of miles away. They are probably on some broadband as well. However, we should never intentionally find it acceptable to lose our low-fi audience. Careful attention to Web optimization should help in this category.
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