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Abstract
Thumbnail images depicting the face of a social actor were the most common type of image used in hard-news stories on the home page of the Sydney Morning Herald online (smh online), a high-circulation Australian daily broadsheet, between 2002 and 2006. While not all online newspapers use such images to the same extent as the smh online, close-up thumbnails of faces are commonplace on online newspaper home pages in general. This paper examines the use of these “thumbnail faces” on the smh online home page. Over four years (and across four page-design periods), these images were used more frequently, despite the fact that they function in a very different way to traditional hard-news images. Thumbnail faces cannot “tell stories”, nor “provide evidence”, but they play an important interpersonal role in individual news stories, collectively on the home page, and over time in the discursive relationship between the smh online and its readership.
Notes
1. This article reports on an aspect of the author's PhD study, conducted in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Sydney.
3. The other two newspapers are the Bangkok Post online published in Thailand, and the People's Daily online English version, published in China.
4. Of the 94 hard-news newsbites studied in this paper, the longer, hyperlinked story could not be accessed in 14 cases at the time when this part of the analysis was conducted (subsequent to the data collection). Therefore, the data given here regarding images in hyperlinked stories come from 80 of the 94 newsbites (85.1% of the stories in the corpus). This limitation applies only to this part of the analysis. All other figures are based on all 94 stories.
5. In periods three and four, the page template allowed for a large, dominant image to be used across the top of the home page and dominate the first screen, or head of the page. This marked design was used to report exceptional news events, such as Hurricane Katrina, and the death of Australian film-maker, conservationist, and media figure Steve Irwin.
7. See Knox (forthcoming a ) for a discussion of publishing the “same” story in different media.
8. This is not to say that information can be “translated” completely between verbal and visual modes. Rather, the point is that the image can be deleted without any significant loss in the representational meaning of the story.
9. In the single exception, there is deixis in the verbal text that can only be resolved with reference to the thumbnail face: that is, this woman and her. The image is still decontextualized and portrays a single actor, and not an event.
10. Note that the orientation of the face in relation to the camera, and the direction of the gaze, are interpersonal aspects of visual communication (see Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996).
11. The original quote from Stenglin discusses museums and their visitors: in the quote, “newspapers” and “readers” are substituted for “museums” and “visitors”.