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ARTICLE: News photographers are depicted as “sidekicks”

News discourse depicts photojournalists as mere “support staff” for reporters, write Mary Angela Bock, Kyser Lough and Deepa Fadnis, all of University of Texas at Austin. The authors used discourse analysis to pick through the coverage of the dramatic, on-air murder of two journalists working on different sides of the camera. Two American journalists working … Continued


Picture: Syrian No Mouth No Words by Surian Soosay, licence CC BY 2.0

ARTICLE: Rethinking media’s responsibility towards refugees

Lilie Chouliaraki and Tijana Stolic, both of the London School of Economics and Political Science, studied newspaper headline images from five European countries. They created a typology of visibilities of the ‘crisis’, each proposing different forms of civic agency and responsibility towards refugees. The authors found five types of visibilities: visibility as biological life, empathy, … Continued


ARTICLE: Victims of sexual violence are represented in highly stereotyped ways

The topic of sexual violence is surrounded by a variety of social beliefs on the subject, writes Sandra Schwark, of Bielefeld University. The article investigates visual representations of sexual violence in online news media in Germany. The author conducted a qualitative thematic analysis of a set of photographs that were obtained from reports about sexual violence … Continued



CFP JRN

CFP | 30.4. | Politics of images in the digital era

An upcoming issue of the journal Problemi dell’Informazione is calling for paper proposals. The issue, entitled “Icons and power. Politics of images in the digital era”, will be published in early 2018. The editors welcome both empirical and theoretical works, in either English or Italian. The call for papers contains the following list of suggested … Continued



ARTICLE: Visual framing of the Ukraine conflict

As political conflicts are defined and, indeed, often enacted in the media, images are powerful carriers of meaning, influencing what we know and how we feel about a conflict, write Markus Ojala and Mervi Pantti, of University of Helsinki, and Jarkko Kangas, of University of Tampere, The article examines how different frames are visually reproduced … Continued


ARTICLE: Australian news photographers and trauma

Fay Anderson, of Monash University, examines Australian news photographers’ and picture editors’ experiences when covering hazardous assignments and the physical and psychological costs. The interviews revealed that PTSD and trauma-related symptoms were rather common. Emotional consequences assumed greater importance in the photographers’ memories than the physical hazards. Not only the suffering and death caused anxiety and depression … Continued


ARTICLE: Visual coverage of the European refugee crisis

In their new article Xu Zhang, of University of Tennessee, and Lea Hellmueller, of University of Houston, examine the evidence of global journalism practices in visual news content by analyzing 287 photographs published on CNN International and Der Spiegel online news sites. The findings illustrate significant differences between the two news sites. For example both … Continued