Citizen eyewitness images and audience engagement in crisis coverage

Abstract

Amateur imagery has become an important component of news coverage of distant crisis events, and it plays a decisive role in shaping how audiences respond to crises. In this article, we discuss how the factors of authenticity, affectivity, and ethics play a role in the ways in which citizen images engage or disengage the distant audience. The article is based on 17 focus group interviews in Sweden and Finland that centred on a selection of visual news coverage of the Arab Spring in Syria and Libya – landmark news events in the use of citizen eyewitness images in the Nordic countries. The results indicate that citizen imagery is indeed a potential tool with strongly engaging characteristics, especially in terms of its authenticity and to some degree also its affectivity. However, disengagement may also result, especially due to the interpreted deficiencies in terms of ethics.

A Sense of Place: VR Journalism and Emotional Engagement

“…Proximity has been understood as a journalistic strategy to signal authority (Allan 2013;Usher 2019;Zelizer 1990). Hence, news organisations aim to amplify audiences' experiences of space-time proximity through reporting techniques such as constructed "on the spot" reporting (Huxford 2007) or the use of citizens' eyewitness imagery that accentuates an embodied sense of being at the scene of events as they happen (Ahva and Hellman 2015;Ahva and Pantti 2014;Usher 2019;Zelizer 2007). Distance, accordingly, is associated with distrust and a lack of an emotional bond (Peters 2011, 34).…”

Watching Disaster News Online and Offline: Audiences Experiencing News about Far-away Disasters in a Postbroadcast Society

“…Recently, the moral accounts and studies focused on textual analysis have been complemented with empirical evidence regarding the audience (Ahva and Hellman 2015; Huiberts 2018; Huiberts and Joye, 2019; Kyriakidou 2015, 2017; Scott 2015; Seu 2015; von Engelhardt 2018; Höijer 2004). There has been a growing interest in audience reactions to distant suffering in the context of postbroadcast media.…”

“…Although on social network sites, such as Facebook, there is no shared physical space, the shared online space could still promote a sense of actuality by the inclusion of live footage and nonprofessional, unedited images. Especially unedited live reporting by citizen journalists on the scene can help in inciting a stronger sense of actuality as such personal and unedited content on one’s timeline can lead to a more intimate and authentic experience or imagining of what is happening (Ahva and Hellman 2015; Crawford 2010; Goggin 2010; Houston et al 2015). The continuous and intense contact between the sufferers and the audience could foster a sense of directness, authenticity, and actuality that broadcast media alone are less capable of.…”

International TV series distribution on Chinese digital platforms: Marketing strategies and audience engagement

“…As aforementioned, this study considers audience engagement at the levels of 'interactive engagement' and 'interpretive engagement' (p. 670) as outlined by Ahva and Hellman (2015). The audience is thus anticipated to be characterised as follows: (1) viewers, wherein engagement involves awareness of the series and is measured through ratings; (2) participants, wherein engagement involves commentary and social media activity and is measured through comment volume; and 3co-creators, wherein engagement involves active construction of meanings and is measured through quality and proliferation of user-generated content (UGC).…”

“…Adopting Ahva and Hellman's (2015) 'interactive' and 'interpretative' levels of audience engagement, the theoretical framework for this study characterised audiences as viewers, participants or co-creators. Based on the review of content on both official and unofficial platforms, the audience were more likely to be viewers of content rather than participants or co-creators.…”