Good piece: A slideshow packed with good content

Alabama DT Marcell Dareus

Creating a slideshow is a little like playing the bass guitar: Easy to do, hard to do well.

Here’s a great example of a good slideshow: Matt Miller’s rundown of the top 20 players in the 2011 NFL draft.

Slideshow ledes are hard to write. There’s a temptation to write, “Now that [some thing] has happened, it’s time to [think about some other thing].”

But that’s not a lede because it’s not what the story is about. It’s background or context. It’s why the story is being written, but it’s not the story. Sports fans generally know what time of year it is. A lede that tells them that and nothing more isn’t doing the job.

Miller almost, but not quite, gets around that problem by writing:

With only two and a half weeks left before the start of the 2011 NFL Draft, we are busy finalizing our top 500 players and taking one more look at film before publishing our scouting reports.

Just like every team in the NFL, we are working hard to learn all we can about every player before the draft kicks off on Thursday, April 28.

At least Miller writes about what he and New Era Scouting are doing, rather than just saying that the draft is almost here. That’s good, but a better approach would have been to talk about how LSU cornerback Patrick Peterson and Texas A&M linebacker Von Miller are at the top of the list of prospects as the draft approaches.

Ledes should be specific, and about what the story is really about.

Beyond that intro, though, Miller goes to town with smart, rich detail on each player. Although he follows a formula, evaluating players on the same group of attributes — pass rush, pursuit, quickness, run defend and so on for defensive linemen, for example — this is not a formulaic slideshow.

You don’t get the idea that Miller is just slapping a few similar words on slide after slide because you have to write something, you can’t just post a picture. There is good, useful information on every slide.

That’s how slideshows should be. Bleacher Report takes a lot of heat for running so many slideshows, some of it justified. But the format works beautifully for a story like this. As a single page story, this piece would be something like 14,000 words. Even if each slide had one third as much writing, it would still be an epic.

As a slideshow, it’s digestible, and you get a photo for each player being discussed.

A good question to ask yourself when putting a slideshow together is: Am I providing value with every slide, not just with the photo but with the text? Matt Miller does a great job of doing that here.