Really Social Photojournalism: A Call to Action

The first intimations that led to this special themed issue of Visual Communication Quarterly formed in 2012, around the time that I began my tenure as a professor in the Communication program at Southern Oregon University.

Educated in a very traditional approach to photojournalism at the University of Texas, but also recently arrived from a prior professional role as a creative director for a commercial photography agency, I surveyed the landscape of mainstream photojournalism with dissatisfaction.

My professional experience biased me toward images that grabbed the attention of buyers and audiences, especially in online streams (a phenomenon we now call “engagement”). But much of the photojournalism that I observed produced by conventional local news organizations failed to rise to the highest ideals of either journalism's social mission or basic best practices for social media engagement.

Coming from a profession in which I had learned to be brutally self-critical about how images produced by our agency held up visually in search results and image streams, I saw that few news organizations consistently produced images and distributed images on social media with similar aesthetic vitality.

Based on those original insights, I presented preliminary research findings at academic conferences (including the University of Oregon's “What Is Journalism?” conference in 2015) and then organized a panel on the topic of Really Social Photojournalism at the 2016 annual meeting of the Association of Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, held in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

From those early opportunities for the academic community to engage with the connections among social media and photojournalism, this special issue of Visual Communication Quarterly has emerged. With the help of the esteemed colleagues who have contributed their research to this issue, I hope that scholars and practitioners can accelerate our national conversation about how photojournalism and social media might thrive together, serving both the highest ideals of photojournalism and the strategic and economic needs of the overall enterprise of journalism.

What Is Really Social Photojournalism?

The terminology of Really Social Photojournalism suggests the intersection of two constituent concepts: Real Photojournalism and Social Photojournalism.

Within the discourse about the value of photojournalism, a narrative of photojournalistic practice has emerged that describes the highest ethical values of journalism: that photojournalism provides an important record of reality, that photojournalism calls attention to the plight of victimized populations, that photojournalism evokes powerful emotional reactions in audiences, and that photojournalism motivates real political change.

In accepting a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Magazine Editors, heralded photojournalist James Nachtwey articulated these claims well:

We navigate dangers, endure hardships and get our hearts broken by what we witness, over and over again, because we believe that peoples' opinions matter—that our society cannot function properly without the information we provide and without the stories we tell.

Our work is aimed at our readers' best instincts—generosity, compassion, a sense of right-and-wrong, a sense of identification with others—on a human level, across cultures, beyond the borders of nationality—and perhaps most importantly, the refusal to accept the unacceptable.

We question the powerful. We hold decision-makers accountable. The chain we help forge links the people we encounter in the field to millions of other individual minds and sensibilities. And once mass consciousness evolves into a shared sense of conscience, change becomes not only possible; it becomes inevitable. (Nachtwey, 2015)

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof also summed up the case for strong photojournalism in 2015, when 3-year-old Syrian refugee Aylan Kurdi drowned as his family attempted to migrate to safety in Europe (Figure 1). The boy's body washed up on a Turkish beach, and news photos made visible the human stakes of the Syrian diaspora.

Figure 1 Nicholas Kristof's tweet in September, 2015 acknowledged the essential role played by photojournalism within the larger domain of journalism.

Despite its noble legacy, the idealistic discourse of photojournalism does not describe the full continuum of photojournalistic practice well and probably does not even represent a large proportion of the daily photographic production of mainstream news institutions.

For every long-form photojournalistic essay and for every emotionally impactful breaking news image brought to audiences by working photojournalists in the field, there are many images that fall outside of those vaunted categories. These daily staples of the photojournalistic profession include person-in-the-street feature images, sports, entertainment, routine public events, and other categories. They serve to illustrate stories and attract reader interest in text-based content but do not aspire to the highest values of photojournalism.

These images are important elements within the design and communication strategies of news organizations, typically carried out with impressive technical competence by working photojournalists. But for the purposes of my assessment, I distinguish them from Real Photojournalism.

Also implicated in the public discourse about photojournalism is a set of presumptions about the power of the visual image when applied for journalistic or rhetorical purposes (see, for example, Monk, 1989). According to both popular and scholarly discourse, journalistic images can have great impact on audiences in their own right, although Domke, Perlmutter, and Spratt (2002) concluded via experimental inquiry that this power is more complex and contingent than is suggested by conventional wisdom.

In contrast, I would suggest that Real Photojournalism is comprised of still-image photographic coverage that displays each of these attributes:

•	Produced by a photographer employed or under contract with an established journalistic organization such as a newspaper, magazine, or photo agency.
•	Provides documentary coverage or extended storytelling of newsworthy events.
•	Derives from enterprising coverage that fulfills an investigative or narrative approach, rather than simple illustration of text-based stories.
•	Aspires to directly fulfill the role of the news institution in serving the larger needs of the community, in the spirit of Herbert Gans's (2010) claims regarding journalism's role as a Bulwark of Democracy. Real Photojournalism must make a deep ethical claim. And the scope of that claim must exceed the simple demonstration of nonmanipulation that often characterizes day-to-day ethical debates in photojournalism.

A properly conceived model for Real Photojournalism probably also encompasses the editorial values proposed by Loup Langton (2009) as essential to a visual newspaper:

•	Photographers are regarded as journalists in every sense of the word.
•	Photographers are proactive about generating stories from their communities and operating effectively in the newsroom to bring those stories to publication.
•	Editors understand that visuals don't have to repeat the information provided in the text-based reporting of a story.
•	Editors apply an educational function regarding the journalists within their organizational sphere of influence.
•	The photographic and design roles and functions of the newspaper are coordinated.

A few salient issues have emerged in the contemporary conversation about the transformation of photojournalism. These have included recent controversies about digital alteration of photojournalistic images, the emergence of citizen photojournalism, the phenomenon of Fake News, and the connection between social media and propaganda.

These issues have provoked a need to understand how citizen photojournalism and professional photojournalism can coexist, and how they should be valued for their societal contributions (Solaroli, 2015; Borges-Ray, 2015). And even as the use of citizen-produced photojournalism has grown, preliminary eye-tracking research has demonstrated that audiences both recognize and value the technical proficiency of professional photojournalists (Quinn, 2015).

Should we consider citizen photojournalism within the domain of Really Social Photojournalism? I say no. My exclusion is not based on the quality or the relevance of newsworthy images produced by citizen journalists. Citizen journalism comprises an important and valuable innovation in the landscape of journalism and a vibrant correction to some of the institutional biases of mainstream journalism. Citizen photojournalism certainly provides an excellent platform for tracking breaking news and day-to-day events within local communities.

But claims such as those made in Jessi Hempel's (2014) celebration of Instagram as a source of breaking news cannot be allowed to obscure the higher ethical call for social responsibility entailed in Real Photojournalism. Citizen journalism cannot fully replace the value brought to the full enterprise of photojournalism by larger news organizations. Successful execution of some kinds of journalistic and photojournalistic projects requires the institutional heft, the culture of collaboration, and the market visibility that only relatively large and stable organizations can sustain. Sometimes, the best coverage of the news requires a newsroom.

Making Real Photojournalism Social

Here are some statements of common wisdom that have become part of the practical landscape for journalists and other professional content producers and publishers: that the Internet is becoming more and more a visual medium in its essence; that strong photographs are essential to promoting strong engagement among audiences; and that nearly every piece of content produced by journalists will fulfill its mission better if accompanied by a strong image, commonly a photograph.

These narratives of best practices are widely held among those who create content on behalf of marketing campaigns, those who devise content strategy for online publications, and for those who work to educate students in best practices for content publication. In many cases, audience metrics also provide evidence that supports these best practices.

This emphasis on visual storytelling has been largely driven by the emergence of social media platforms as dominant mechanisms by which we communicate at both interpersonal and societal scale. The discourse about the need for photography to accompany other content is especially conditioned by the proliferation of visual social media platforms, including Instagram, Tumblr, and Pinterest.

While many journalists and journalistic organizations have adopted these visual platforms, few have done so in a social-first fashion, and few operate in a way that meaningfully suggests a serious practice of photojournalism as an element of a successful content strategy or as a means of engagement. We are more likely to hear examples such as the Chicago Times, which laid off its entire staff of photojournalists in favor of mobile photography training for its reporters (Worstall, 2013), than we are to hear instances where news publications combine photojournalism and social media to further their journalistic missions. For most online news publications, photography is necessary but not in their DNA as storytellers.

However, some news organizations have taken the lead in conceiving and executing strategies for visual-first social media directed toward their larger journalistic missions. The New York Times launched several targeted Instagram accounts in January, 2015 (Blattberg, 2015) and launched its premiere Instagram presence @nytimes in March, 2015 (Mullin, 2015). Meanwhile, National Public Radio rebooted its Tumblr strategy and reports positive results (Bryan, Zambelich, Bogle, Parkinson-Morgan, & Chappellet-Lanier, 2015). Along with NPR, other large news organizations that have adopted Tumblr with serious intent include NBC News, USA Today, The Washington Post, and The Guardian (Albeneau, 2014). Another round of early Tumblr adopters includes the Financial Times, The Economist, The Times of London, and the New Statesman, as reported by Jon Bernstein (2013). National Geographic was an early adopter of Instagram, signing a brand partnership shortly after Instagram's launch (Laurent, 2012). The Chicago Tribune simultaneously launched both a primary account and an account for vintage archival photos on Instagram in 2014 and found that the vintage account outpaced the primary feed in following by a five-to-one margin (Spinner, 2015).

Further promising (although occasionally controversial) developments have included the emergence of Ben Lowy, Damon Winter, Peter Dicampo, and other serious photojournalists as mobile-first and social-first practitioners (Estrin, 2012a, 2012b).

In addition to the journalistic values that are shared by these and other photojournalistic initiatives by established news organizations, these projects entail a social-first worldview. That worldview contributes to the attributes of what I am calling Really Social Photojournalism. In addition to strong journalistic values, Really Social Photojournalism entails several more attributes:

•	Audience Engagement First: Really Social Photojournalism intends to engage with an audience on a social media platform, following a strategy intended to promote a key performance indicator based on a social media analytic.
•	Assigned Content: Really Social Photojournalism derives from the intentional act of a photojournalist to go into the world and make photojournalism for use by a news organization. Other images such as wire photos, archive images, crowd-sourced content, and illustrations are all appropriate elements of a strong news feed on social media, but those feeds must also include images driven by the values of Really Social Photojournalism.
•	Social KPI: Practitioners of Really Social Photojournalism have a high commitment to track the success of each post in the social media landscape using valid quantitative measures of Key Performance Indicators. They are also committed to practices of audience development that will show growth in KPIs in a sustained fashion. Depending on the platform and the strategic needs of the news organization, KPIs might entail sustained growth in followers, impressions, likes, or other measures of engagement.
•	Enterprise: Really Social Photojournalism is committed to extended practices of storytelling and will typically not entail spot-news or feature coverage of stories, no matter how visually compelling those might be.
•	Visual: Really Social Photojournalism depends on visual storytelling first and foremost and does not serve as simple illustration of text-based journalism.

This special issue of Visual Communication Quarterly compiles a diverse array of approaches to theory and method focused on an equally diverse set of topics within the scope of contemporary visual journalism. Not every scholar in this special issue has adopted the concept of Really Social Photojournalism in the way that I have framed it in my own scholarship, and our shared consideration of photojournalism has extended to citizen journalism, political journalism, and other contexts.

But the strength of our work here remains in our clear-headed and forward-looking approach to photojournalism and social media. Every scholar represented here has committed to understanding the landscape of photojournalism as it exists today and to forming theoretical and practical perspectives that can guide academic and professional practice in photojournalism moving into the future.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Erik Palmer

Erik Palmer, Ph.D., is Associate Professor and Chair of the Communication program at Southern Oregon University, and also an Associate Editor for Visual Communication Quarterly. Previously, he served as Managing Producer for Trackwire Online, an online sports news site; and Creative Director for Vico Images, a globally distributed commercial photography agency. E-mail: [email protected]