The study of emotion in journalism has largely been ignored and, when studied, is relegated almost exclusively to media texts. As such, this research aims to rectify this imbalance by focusing on the ...human side of journalism practice and the emotional labor and work experienced by documentary visual journalists. It does so through an in-depth, interview-based approach with 23 journalists in eight countries and identifies the sources of emotional labor and work experienced by those in the profession and how visual journalists manage the effects of the emotional labor and work they experience. The findings suggest that emotional labor and work pervade the production, editing, and post-production phases of journalistic work but not equally for all types of visual journalists. Female journalists, in particular, reported unique emotional investment and display practices, while a subset of male journalists reported unique emotional management ones. In addition, almost across the board, the visual journalists in this sample reported relying on more informal rather than formal strategies to manage the effects of their work-related emotions.
This study explores a key question around local visual news: what do non-specialist journalists regard as a quality news visual? This study focuses on still images as the most ubiquitous building ...block in the local visual news landscape, whether as thumbnails that are shared with links on social media platforms, as hero images accompanying articles, as photo galleries, or as still frames extracted from videos. Much of what we know about a quality news visual comes from the perspectives of visually literate specialists: photo editors, photojournalists, and related roles. Yet, despite the ubiquity of photographs within print and digital news, they are increasingly being made not by staff photojournalists but, rather, by freelancers, words-based reporters, or community members. As these dynamics have shifted over the past two decades, scholarship has struggled to keep up with how non-specialist journalists define the attributes and properties of a quality news visual. This study aims to address this gap within the context of local and regional news using an interview-based approach and finds that interviewees most commonly defined quality news photographs through the lens of news values, followed by technical considerations and narrative dimensions, aesthetics, the perceived effect the visual had on the audience, how the visual was made and presented, and who or what was photographed.
This comparative review seeks to explore how international, innovative, multimodal and representative the scholarship published in two visual communication journals, Visual Communication ( VC) and ...Visual Communication Quarterly ( VCQ), is over a 25-year period (from VCQ’s founding in 1994 and from VC’s founding in 2002 through 2019). Through examining all 544 research articles published in these journals over this timeframe, an understanding can be achieved regarding which countries and geographic regions have received attention, the methods and means used to advance the authors’ arguments, the visuals under consideration and the authors’ focus and aims, which sometimes overlap with the visuals under consideration and are sometimes distinct from them. The results inform areas of potential future exploration, focus and attention for these two journals but are grounded in an understanding that systemic conditions also influence the types and designs of research that can be published and recognized.
Many scholars find the peer-review process to be a puzzling, non-transparent, and subjective exercise. Many emerging scholars also learn about the peer-review and publishing process through painful ...and time-consuming trial and error while still students or as early-career researchers rather than through formal training or guided supervision. Yet many pitfalls exist in this process for new and veteran scholars alike. With this study, grounded in the communication field, we aim to pull back the curtain on this opaque process and assist scholars in their publishing ambitions while also providing suggestions, primarily for journal editors and those who train future reviewers, about how the peer-review process can be improved for collective benefit. To do so, this grounded theory study reviews a year's worth of reviews from a communication journal to explore which issues reviewers identify within the submitted research, to explore how the reviewer feedback reveals their implicit understanding of their role in the peer-review process, and to identify how clear reviewers and editors are regarding which feedback is most important. Taken together, this allows for an understanding of how reviewers and editors engage in the social construction of research. The results inform the training of communication scholars, reviewers, and editors.
Human migration due to political upheaval is rapidly accelerating, yet scholarly attention to refugees' visual news representations has lagged. Using a visual analysis informed by the transnational ...writings of Yuval-Davis related to the politics of belonging and the peace/conflict frame literature, 811 images primarily depicting migration from Turkey into Europe in 2015 and submitted to the Pictures of the Year International competition were examined. Analysis determined that, despite billions of dollars in aid and millions of migrants who have benefited from food assistance and other development opportunities, the photographers overwhelmingly highlighted the migrants' transitory nature, vulnerability and differences while minimizing any attempt to depict the shared connections or integrations that were occurring. As media are orienting devices, this has profound implications for how migrants are regarded on both the individual as well as the collective levels.
The skyrocketing number and severity of issues in Australian aged care led to the establishment of the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety in 2018. Yet, compared to other Royal ...Commissions, media coverage has been relatively muted, and public awareness and engagement with aged care issues has been uneven. Journalists bear a significant responsibility for shaping the national conversation about aged care, and ensuring this demographic is reflected in the news Australians consume. Due to their unique properties, images are especially important in giving visibility to this historically marginalised topic, and to emotionally engaging an often apathetic public. As such, this study focuses on the aged care visuals accompanying Australian news coverage during the period of the Royal Commission's announcement through to four weeks after the government's response. Drawing on the lens of symbolic annihilation, it does this through a visual analysis that examines who or what is represented and the role of news values in shaping the selection of images included with news reports over this period.
This study uses news photographs and interviews with journalists to explore how Australia's unprecedented 2019-2020 bushfire season was depicted for Australian and non-Australian audiences in order ...to extend transnational understanding of iconicity's tenets and how news values vary across contexts. It does so first by examining the Sydney Morning Herald's coverage over 3 months and then by contrasting this with international coverage that began in early 2020 once the issue spilled onto the world stage. Australia's coverage focused intensely on human actors involved in the disaster while the vast numbers of affected animals were virtually absent. In contrast, international media visually depicted the disaster as an environmental and ecological issue with global consequences. The results suggest a need for a definition of iconicity that is inclusive to non-human actors and to inanimate forces that are personified. It also extends our cross-cultural understanding of the visual expression of news values.
Older Australians, particularly those in aged-care settings, are frequently targets of persistent discrimination and marginalisation. Media portrayals of older people contribute to how broader ...society sees and values this demographic. Acknowledging this, the present study analyses how journalists visually cover ageing and the aged care sector during a critical event 'frame': the calling of, and government response to, the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety from 2018 through 2021. This study recognises that the type of representation of older people in media is more difficult to examine than simply the frequency of representation. Using visual social semiotics as an analytical framework, this paper examined 351 images from a nationally representative news sample published over the 30-month timeframe. This approach has enabled us to go beyond simple frequencies of who is depicted and explore in a more nuanced way how older Australians are depicted, and with what implications.
While business models and technological innovations continue to disrupt journalistic practice, global image culture has never been stronger. Developed society is inundated daily with a torrent of ...images. Yet some of these are barely seen, while others almost instantly accrue scores of likes, shares, and comments. What, then, are the factors that constitute engaging, social photojournalism? Using Q methodology, which bridges qualitative and quantitative approaches, 30 participants ranked photos published on Instagram by news organizations or photographers and shared insight through interviews on what factors affect their engagement. In this way, the users' and the images' characteristics were both studied to shed light on why certain photos accrue more engagement and why certain types of people "like" certain types of content. The findings identify three types of users-feature lovers, newshounds, and optimists-and describe their motivations for interacting on the platform. Insights on how the number of people in the frame, the visibility of facial features, the presence of watermarks, and the post type affect user engagement were also gathered and discussed.
A majority of Americans distrust the news media due to concerns over comprehensiveness, accuracy, and fairness. Since many interactions between journalists and their subjects last only minutes and ...can be published within seconds, if not live, research is needed to explore how journalists' understandings of their subjects' narratives evolve over time and how much time is necessary to avoid surface-level coverage. Also, since people are now exposed to more image-based rather than text-based messages, additional research is necessary to explore how the verbal narratives spoken by subjects compare to their nonverbal narratives as captured by news photographers in visual form. Through a longitudinal, interview-based approach, a photojournalist working on a 30-plus-day picture story was interviewed weekly for six weeks over the course of his project to track perceptions of how his subjects' verbal narratives changed. At the conclusion of the project, the photojournalist's subjects were also interviewed to explore how their verbal and nonverbal narratives compared. Informed by literature in role theory, narrative, and visual journalism, the findings explore how news media narratives can be more nuanced and how people shape their visual and verbal narratives consciously and unconsciously. Additional findings suggest that comprehensiveness, accuracy, and fairness are intimately related to interaction duration and that visual narratives can highlight role conformity and conflict in ways not possible through verbal narratives alone.
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