The World has begun an internal debate over what sorts of photos we should publish.
It all started with a new online feature: Seen@.
This is a feature where journalists shoot photos of people at events — faces in the crowd at festivals, graduations, games — and post them online.

The photos are among the most popular features at the Web site. Readers have clicked thousands of times through these collections of photos.
So, if people like these online, why not run some of them in the paper, too?
The debate in the newsroom is over whether those photos have a place in the printed newspaper. Questions that come up include: What value do they add for a reader? What information do those photos give? Is it journalism?

Here’s a little background.
One way to look at staff-produced photos in a traditional newspaper like The World is to break them into two categories:
Candid — This is the preferred photo because it strives to capture the subject while they are essentially oblivious to the photographer’s presence and, perhaps, reveal an insight into the person or the event at that moment. Think: photograph of a basketball player fighting hard for a rebound during a game.
This purity of this approach breaks down a little in many situations because most people find it somewhat difficult to 100 percent ignore a person pointing a big camera at them as they go about their daily business. Is it really a natural shot? But that’s a debate for another day.
Posed — Usually these are small mug shots. Sometimes we use posed shots called “environmental portraits” for profile stories. The person photographed will be looking at the camera, so you know it was posed. Generally, I think it’s fair to say these photos are pics of a last resort.
Now enter: Seen@
They’re not mug shots. They’re not candid shots. They’re something different.

Should we use them in the paper? What do you think?