The New York Times shook things up a few months ago with a fairly comprehensive redesign of their website, widening the page, and generally throwing out all the old layout and typefaces.  I don't remember hearing a lot about their decision to move to wider picture formats, but I think that more than anything else that decision is making the difference for me as a reader.

Take the above example, shot by Ellie Kurttz and borrowed from a great, new article by Ben Brantley about this year's summer of Shakespeare.  The pictures aren't just larger than on the old Times site, there's more space in them.  A few months ago, this picture would have been cropped differently, omitting the negative space on either side of the actress.  Do you need that space?  Well, yes and no.  If all you are looking for is a representative image to introduce the story, then no, just use a close-up.  But if what you want is to convey a sense of drama, to add something to the article, then you need the context and scale that a more spacious image provides.

If you look at a relatively benign story like this one (about nuclear waste disposal), you can see how the use of empty space in the photograph lends the whole story a sense of tension and weightiness.  For the Brantley article, whose thesis is that this season's stagings of Shakespeare plays (particularly the bloody ones) are particularly pertinent in light of recent events ("The current investigations into the alleged rape and murder of civilians by American soldiers in Iraq have made such presentations tremble with inescapable timeliness"), the picture attempts to put a new, more relevant face on a familiar subject.

By using an image from the Ninagawa Company of Tokyo's ethereal production of Titus Andronicus, the Times editors are exploiting the strangeness of a non-Western staging of a classic of Western drama.  However, by allowing the image of the traumatized woman to expand out to either side, the editors intensify the sense of suffering and loneliness that would be missing from a more cramped closeup.

The effect is stunningly artistic (if you'll pardon the word), and the depth and emotion that it lends to the article is almost unsettling when one considers that this is the Times we're talking about.  The Paper of Record.  The Old Gray Lady.  But with this redesign, the Times is one of the most gorgeous things on the internet.