alt Hacker NewsSome use of hero images by bloggers is a deliberate style choice, to emulate the norms of professional journalism.
A lot of traditional news outlets have a style rule that every article must have an image. Look at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news https://www.nytimes.com/ https://www.economist.com etc - every article has an image. Even a report on something highly abstract - "BP reports record profits" - will be illustrated with a photograph of some BP-branded fuel pumps. Stories on things like cybersecurity and inflation get generic images like snippets of blurry computer code, banknotes etc.
Some bloggers feel their blog is improved by adopting the style of professional journalism, and (among other things) put an image on every article. Even if for a programming blog good lead images are hard to come by.
Interestingly, professional journalism organisations often have pretty strict codes of practice about images, and photoshop use. They have rules on everything from illustrating one rocket launch with a photo of another to posing the subjects to colour-correcting images to creating multi-image collages. So I don't imagine we'll see many AI-generated images in traditional news outlets any time soon.
Replies
There was a thing about a year ago where YouTubers were holding lapel mics in their hands to show they don't really know what they're doing, on purpose, to differentiate themselves from the big players.
> Interestingly, professional journalism organisations often have pretty strict codes of practice about images, and photoshop use.
I seem to recall many instances of the use of incorrect photos, and the earliest I heard of was in the The Guardian in the 1980s before the general decline in media quality and standards.
People who know more about the topic than I do will argue for a default image for an online article for SEO and other reasons. Online pubs I've done stuff for would usually take a good/relevant photo if you have one. But, otherwise, would generally use some fairly generic stock graphic from some service they subscribed to.
Same goes for book covers. You probably need something unless you want to look really generic and cheap. But I'm mostly not going to pay a designer hundreds+ of dollars for a cover of an independently published book. I have had a former colleague who is actually good with this sort of thing do it in the past. I've also done a crappy job myself, done it in conjunction with a publisher (for whom I had the supply the cover image), and, yes, used generative AI/Photoshop.