Visual Gatekeeping – Selection of News Photographs at a Flemish Newspaper

Smaele, Hedwig De; Geenen, Eline; Cock, Rozane De

doi:10.1515/nor-2017-0414

Cited by 19 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…In their study, de Smaele et al (2017) investigated visual professionals’ image selection practices at a newspaper’s photo desk in Belgium to find that the most important criteria for selecting an image was its capacity to convey the news. They highlighted that, beyond the individual level, image selection is highly affected by organisational and practical constraints and the overall professional environment.…”

Section: Gatekeepers’ Ethical Orientationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Distributing ethics: Filtering images of death at three news photo desks

Mäenpää

2021

Journalism

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This article explores the practices of selecting news images that depict death at a global picture agency, national picture agency and a news magazine. The study is based on ethnographic observations and interviews ( N = 30) from three Western-based news organisations, each representing a link in the complex international news-image circulation process. Further, the organisations form an example of a chain of filters through which most of the news images produced for the global market have to pass before publication. These filters are scrutinised by the empirical case studies that examine the professionals’ ethical reasoning regarding images of violence and death. This research contributes to an understanding of the differences and similarities between media organisations as filters and sheds light on their role in shaping visual coverage. This study concludes that photojournalism professionals’ ethical decision-making is discursively constructed around three frames: (1) shared ethics, (2) relative ethics and (3) distributed ethics. All the organisations share certain similar conceptions of journalism ethics at the level of ideals. On the level of workplace practices and routines, a mixture of practical preconditions, journalism’s self-regulation, business logic and national legislation lead to differences in the image selection practices. It is argued that the ethical decision-making is distributed between – and sometimes even outsourced to – colleagues working in different parts of the filtering chain. Finally, this study suggests that dead or suffering bodies are often invisible in the images of the studied media organisations.

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Section: Gatekeepers’ Ethical Orientationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Distributing ethics: Filtering images of death at three news photo desks

Mäenpää

2021

Journalism

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“…In the history of journalism and visual communication, a variety of research points to the existence of mechanisms of editorial control, internal filtering, gatekeeping and agenda setting when it comes to deciding what image appears (or not) on the front page of a newspaper (Fahmy et al, 2014;Smaele et al, 2017). Along these lines, Shahira Fahmy's quantitative case studies on Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, or the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, focusing on photojournalistic coverage, show that certain visual representation variables such as the drama of the image or the geographical and cultural proximity of the subject, as well as the corporate origin of the photograph (whether it is taken by staff photojournalists or comes from agencies such as Reuters and AFP), are key to determining which photos end up on the front page of newspapers, with significant ideological and ethical differences depending on the country, the type of medium, and the professional background of the photographers/journalists.…”

Section: Is Economic Power Visible? a Central Motif And Two Off-screen Imagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Images and visual motifs of Spanish economic power: the IBEX court and the banking crisis (2011–2013)

Garin

Fernández²

2021

Communication & Society

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The media help to construct the visual and iconographic imagery of economic power in the dialectical tension between what they show and what they leave out of view. Images such as unemployment queues, graphs, and portraits of the powerful appear assiduously on the front pages of the press, revealing different visual motifs essential to understanding the narrative of the economy, with its inheritances, mutations and hierarchies, which point to its relationship with other spheres of power such as the monarchy or politics. This article attempts to decipher the codes of visual representation of the economic sphere in Spain through the qualitative analysis of front-page photographs published in El País, El Mundo and La Vanguardia from 2011 to 2013, a period marked by the banking and financial crisis, civil protests, or the judicial prosecution of figures such as Rodrigo Rato. The methodology used combines visual analysis and comparative iconography with theoretical foundations of social semiotics and visual communication, as well as interviews with photojournalists and chiefs of staff. Finally, the results conclude that both economic leaders and the media codify their photographs using specific visual motifs to project a distant and proactive image of the banking elite, which is only disrupted when previously revered figures of the economic elite fall from grace in corruption cases. And also, that in the dialectic of the visible and the invisible of economic power there are hidden historical moments that can never be photographed.

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“…. [as] the content, size, placement and colour of photos draw readers into pages" (Smaele, Geenen, and Cock 2017). This could be explained because most of us tend to take pictures as inherently credible (Kelly and Nace 1994;Newman et al 2012).…”

Section: The Magic Of Techno-images On Social Mediamentioning

confidence: 99%

A Digital Picture to Hold Us Captive?

Marin¹

2021

Philosophy Today

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In this article I investigate online misinformation from a media philosophy perspective. I, thus move away from the debate focused on the semantic content, concerned with what is true or not about misinformation. I argue rather that online misinformation is the effect of an informational climate promoted by user micro-behaviours such as liking, sharing, and posting. Misinformation online is explained as the effect of an informational environment saturated with and shaped by techno-images in which most users act automatically under the constant assault of stirred emotions, a state resembling what media philosopher Vilém Flusser has called techno-magical consciousness. I describe three ways in which images function on social media to induce this distinctive, uncritical mode of consciousness, and complement Flusser’s explanation with insights from the phenomenology of emotions.

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Visual Gatekeeping – Selection of News Photographs at a Flemish Newspaper

Cited by 19 publications

References 31 publications

Distributing ethics: Filtering images of death at three news photo desks

Distributing ethics: Filtering images of death at three news photo desks

Images and visual motifs of Spanish economic power: the IBEX court and the banking crisis (2011–2013)

A Digital Picture to Hold Us Captive?

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