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Abstract
The development of digital technology in recent years has led to a revolution in news production and dissemination. In terms of production, we have witnessed a fundamental shift towards visual story-telling. Images dominate the verbal story space and have the potential to become the story themselves. Beyond this, they are also creating unique spaces for themselves (e.g. the online news gallery), with new multimodal genres posing challenges for practitioners and analysts alike. The potential effects of such fundamental shifts on the professional news story-telling practices of the legacy news media provide a rich research opportunity for understanding both how and whether news organisations fulfil their mandate of making sense of the plethora of information that is now available. In this paper, we concern ourselves with one particular innovation in visual news reporting – the online news gallery, or picture gallery in journalism terms. We report on a qualitative analysis of 35 galleries from 12 English-language newspapers with online presence from Europe, North America, Australia and Asia, and interrogate the choices made by institutions in composing this particular type of multimodal “text”, as it is situated in a professional, news story-telling context. In doing so, we explore how a systemic-functional semiotic approach to multimodal news discourse may help us to access the meaning potential of this emerging genre as a vehicle for multimodal digital news reporting, present a framework for the multimodal analysis of online news galleries and consider its implications for the education of media practitioners.
Acknowledgements
We are immensely grateful to colleagues in multimodality and SFL who have given valuable feedback on earlier versions of the research presented in this paper. These include colleagues at MODE, Institute of Education, University of London, UK, and at the Friday SFL Seminars at the University of Sydney, Australia. Thanks also to Monika Bednarek who read and commented on an earlier version of this article, and to the reviewer who gave valuable feedback on the structure of this article. We would also like to acknowledge the generosity of the Moscow Times and website editor Eva Hartog-Skorobogatova for giving us copyright permission to use their galleries free of charge.
Notes on contributors
Helen Caple is a Senior Lecturer in Journalism at the University of New South Wales, Australia. Her research interests centre on press photography, text–image relations and the construction of news values in images. She is also exploring more broadly the role of press photography in contemporary journalism, including in the online environment. This work has resulted in a monograph with Palgrave Macmillan entitled Photojournalism: A Social Semiotic Approach (2013). She is also the co-author of News Discourse (2012, with Monika Bednarek), which examines the news media from a linguistic and social semiotic perspective. See <http://www.helencaple.com/index.html>.
John Knox is a Lecturer in Linguistics at Macquarie University. He teaches primarily on the postgraduate programmes in Applied Linguistics. His research interests include multimodality, language in education, social semiotics and mediated discourse. See <http://tiny.cc/ykkapx>.
Galleries cited [in order of mention]
“Impressions of Armenia”, Moscow Times.
<http://www.themoscowtimes.com/multimedia/photogalleries/impressions-of-armenia/5441.html>
“Earthquake rocks North India”, Times of India.
<http://photogallery.indiatimes.com/news/india/earthquake-rocks-north-india/articleshow/19579326.cms>
“Margaret Thatcher: A Life in Pictures”, Guardian. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/gallery/2013/apr/08/margaret-thatcher-life-in-pictures>
“24 hours of Moscow”, Moscow Times.
<http://www.themoscowtimes.com/multimedia/photogalleries/24-hours-of-moscow/5392.html>
“Indonesian Plane Crash”, Daily Telegraph Australia.
<http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/gallery/gallery-e6frewxi-1226620136191>
“Qinghai Lake continues expanding”, China Daily.
<http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/photo/2013-03/12/content_16302682.htm>
“War buddies reunite”, Sydney Morning Herald.
<http://www.smh.com.au/photogallery/national/war-buddies-reunite-20130406-2hdmg.html>
“Margaret Thatcher's Years in Office”, Daily Telegraph, UK.
“Actress Anjali goes missing”, Times of India.
“In Photos: Family and Friends say Farewell to Rehtaeh Parsons”, Globe and Mail.
“Fire hits Residential Building in Beijing”, China Daily.
<http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/slides/2013-03/09/content_16294555.htm>
“Semi Final – Western Sydney Wanderers versus Brisbane Roar”, Sydney Morning Herald.
“Christian [sic.] protesting against Islamic hardliners [sic.] attacks”, Jakarta Post.
Notes
1. Totals do not add up to 100 as sites may offer more than one type of multimedia.
2. All galleries cited in this paper are listed at the end of the reference list with their URLs. As is common with web texts, the visual presentation of some of these galleries has changed since their original publication. Analysis was conducted on the galleries as they appeared at the time of data collection.
3. Galleries that are structured according to time can be further sub-classified into episodic, sequential or cumulative, but we do not pursue these sub-classifications here for reasons of space.
4. We have not included the systems of IMAGE in this diagram, again for reasons of space and because they have been discussed in relation to professional quality in other publications (e.g. see Caple 2013 on aesthetics in press photography). The system of news type is not included in this figure, as the quality of galleries in our data-set does not appear to be restricted on the basis of choosing hard news, soft news or sport.