The study “Seeing Beyond Crisis: Analyzing Photographs and Photographer Bylines in Solutions-Oriented Environmental Journalism Stories” by Ivy Ashe from Florida Atlantic University and Kyser Lough from University of Georgia looked at the visuals in environmental journalism stories through a solutions journalism perspective and how environment is visually represented there.
Environmental journalism emerged as a dedicated news beat shortly after the middle of the twentieth century as typically a reactive type of journalism focusing on the aftermath of catastrophic events. Although largely reactive, this study focuses on solutions journalism about environmental topics.
Solutions journalism has been found out to increase reader engagement online and leave readers with more feelings of optimism and self-efficacy (McIntyre 2019; McIntyre, Lough, and Manzanares 2018).
Congruence in the visuals is also an important point: for example, heat waves in Europe were unfittingly visualized by “fun in the sun” imagery (Thier and Lin 2022). Newsrooms also rarely assign photographers to such stories, relying instead on wire sources or organizations.
The research questions gauged how environmental journalism stories were visualized, how congruent the images were, and the relation with the solutions element. They also looked at how the environment is visually depicted, what issue topics have the most visual representation, and whether people were present in the images.
A content analysis was performed on 175 environmental journalism stories with a total of 608 photographs. The stories were published in 2018-2022. One of the authors and a graduate student assistant coded the stories on the basis of general information and the research questions.
Based on the results of the analysis, the photographs in the stories were largely congruent with the story, with 92.8% depicting someone or something mentioned in the story. However, the solution in solutions journalism stories was only shown in 68% of the stories. The authors noted that it is difficult to know why this portion was so low.
Solutions photographs had a tendency to show either the ones implementing a solution or those benefiting from it, sometimes in the same photo. The inventor of the solution was rarely shown, however.
There was a break with historical environmental journalism in that the conflict or the problem was rarely shown, although some neutral photos showed the population affected by the issue. Also, there were photos of landscapes, but the authors cautioned that such photos may separate humans from their surroundings (Jones et al. 2019).
People were present in about 60 percent of the photos, a finding in line with other results from environmental journalism. When it comes to the source of the photos, a significant amount were indeed “courtesy photos” from wire sources or NGOs.
The authors lastly note that a direct comparison between solutions stories and non-solutions stories might be a fruitful topic for extra studies to shed light on any narrative differences between photojournalism approaches.
The article “Seeing Beyond Crisis: Analyzing Photographs and Photographer Bylines in Solutions-Oriented Environmental Journalism Stories” by Ivy Ashe and Kyser Lough is in Journalism Studies. (Free abstract).
Picture: Earth Day CleanUp 2021. Great Global CleanUp. Two people with bikes holding banner and cleanup bag.
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