Playing with words and pictures : intersemiosis in a new genre of news reportage

The newspaper is dead. Long live the newspaper! It goes without saying that now, more than ever, newspapers, in their print form, are fighting for their very survival. It is also widely acknowledged that one of the greatest assets a newspaper has is its bond with its readers, and if newspapers are to stand up to the challenges of the 21st Century they need to nurture this bond or perish. One newspaper that does appear to have found an innovative way to build community among its readers is the Australian broadsheet newspaper The Sydney Morning Herald. At this newspaper, certain news stories are packaged in a way that foregrounds a play on words and pictures. This forms an evaluative stance on the news event being depicted and creates an opportunity for the newspaper to bond with its readers over this wit. The photographs used in these stories are also noted for their quality: their striking clarity and composition creating a certain aesthetic appeal. I have termed this news story genre the image-nuclear news story. Between June 2004 and August 2008, all image-nuclear news stories were actively collected from The Sydney Morning Herald. This produced a total of 1317 stories. A smaller corpus of 1000 stories was logged and analysed in a relational database. Building on social semiotic theories of language and images, this research project investigated the intersemiotic play established through the multiplication of meaning at the interface between words and images in the image-nuclear news story. The analysis also included investigation of the kinds of photographs that are commonly used in image-nuclear news stories both in terms of their news values and compositional/aesthetic qualities. Finally, the project examined the potential effects of this play and use of image for bonding and community building between newspapers and their readers, as well as between readers and the news events. The findings of this research suggest that the inclusion of stories such as image-nuclear news stories in the news story repertoire at The Sydney Morning Herald can be viewed as encouraging a readership that can pride itself in the knowledge that this newspaper caters to their extensive understanding of the world and to their wit. In turn, this means that this newspaper can establish a very powerful readership profile that can be easily packaged and sold to advertisers. This may also be viewed as an attempt by the newspaper to set itself apart from other news providers, maintaining readership loyalties through this special relationship with its readers, and thus prolonging the longevity of the newspaper amid the ever growing and sometimes fierce competition from other media platforms

Playing with words and pictures : intersemiosis in a new genre of news reportage

The newspaper is dead. Long live the newspaper! It goes without saying that now, more than ever, newspapers, in their print form, are fighting for their very survival. It is also widely acknowledged that one of the greatest assets a newspaper has is its bond with its readers, and if newspapers are to stand up to the challenges of the 21st Century they need to nurture this bond or perish. One newspaper that does appear to have found an innovative way to build community among its readers is the Australian broadsheet newspaper The Sydney Morning Herald. At this newspaper, certain news stories are packaged in a way that foregrounds a play on words and pictures. This forms an evaluative stance on the news event being depicted and creates an opportunity for the newspaper to bond with its readers over this wit. The photographs used in these stories are also noted for their quality: their striking clarity and composition creating a certain aesthetic appeal. I have termed this news story genre the image-nuclear news story. Between June 2004 and August 2008, all image-nuclear news stories were actively collected from The Sydney Morning Herald. This produced a total of 1317 stories. A smaller corpus of 1000 stories was logged and analysed in a relational database. Building on social semiotic theories of language and images, this research project investigated the intersemiotic play established through the multiplication of meaning at the interface between words and images in the image-nuclear news story. The analysis also included investigation of the kinds of photographs that are commonly used in image-nuclear news stories both in terms of their news values and compositional/aesthetic qualities. Finally, the project examined the potential effects of this play and use of image for bonding and community building between newspapers and their readers, as well as between readers and the news events. The findings of this research suggest that the inclusion of stories such as image-nuclear news stories in the news story repertoire at The Sydney Morning Herald can be viewed as encouraging a readership that can pride itself in the knowledge that this newspaper caters to their extensive understanding of the world and to their wit. In turn, this means that this newspaper can establish a very powerful readership profile that can be easily packaged and sold to advertisers. This may also be viewed as an attempt by the newspaper to set itself apart from other news providers, maintaining readership loyalties through this special relationship with its readers, and thus prolonging the longevity of the newspaper amid the ever growing and sometimes fierce competition from other media platforms

What is news? News values revisited (again)

The deceptively simple question “What is news?” remains pertinent even as we ponder the future of journalism in the digital age. This article examines news values within mainstream journalism and considers the extent to which news values may be changing since earlier landmark studies were undertaken. Its starting point is Harcup and O’Neill’s widely-cited 2001 updating of Galtung and Ruge’s influential 1965 taxonomy of news values. Just as that study put Galtung and Ruge’s criteria to the test with an empirical content analysis of published news, this new study explores the extent to which Harcup and O’Neill’s revised list of news values remain relevant given the challenges (and opportunities) faced by journalism today, including the emergence of social media. A review of recent literature contextualises the findings of a fresh content analysis of news values within a range of UK media 15 years on from the last study. The article concludes by suggesting a revised and updated set of contemporary news values, whilst acknowledging that no taxonomy can ever explain everything

Re-imagining human rights photography: Ariella Azoulays intervention

Gormley and Allan focus on several pertinent theoretical contributions made by Ariella Azoulay that invite a radical rethinking of familiar assumptions regarding human rights photography. Having established a conceptual basis, they proceed to analyse several examples of photojournalists attempting to ‘activate’ viewers by inviting them to co-create photographic narratives via methods of hypertext and online archival interaction, and of International Non Governmental Organisations (INGOs) working to create projects which ‘speak’ to viewers by involving the children they seek to represent in the production of photography. It is argued that in taking up Azoulay’s call to rethink public relationships to human rights imagery, these projects represent progressive steps towards addressing the multifarious inequalities at stake. At the same time, however, realising this potential depends on making good the promise of rendering visible the normative ideals of human rights

Narrative and Media: Helen Fulton with Rosemary Huisman, Julian Murphet and Anne Dunn, Melbourne, 2005.

Book review Narrative and Media Helen Fulton, with Rosemary Huisman, Julian Murphet, and Anne Dunn, Melbourne, 2005. The book Narrative and Media should be of great interest to students and scholars of Media Studies alike. Coming from a post-structuralist perspective, the book interrogates the ideological implications of narrative strategies across the major forms of the media, and offers a clear and cogent explanation of how readers are positioned as consumers of the media. With the commodification of the media becoming more and more prevalent, media scholars need to develop a reliable set of theoretical tools rigorous enough to unpack how it is that the media is able to maintain its \u27objective\u27 facade, and this book goes a long way to demonstrating how this is achieved

Putting visual and verbal resources to work in the expression of political opinion on the social media platform Instagram

This paper examines discourses about politicians and their parties/policies during the 2016 Australian federal election that emerged on the photo-sharing social media site, Instagram, as expressed through both verbal and visual semiotic resources (e.g. in a hashtag, #fuckyouturnbull, or in an image where the represented participant is wearing a campaign t-shirt). The dataset consists of 92 Instagram posts that made use of the discourse tagging hashtag #dogsatpollingstations, and which were posted on this social media site on 2 July 2016 (the day of the federal election). The paper focuses on qualitative multimodal discourse analysis of this small #dogsatpollingstations dataset, in order to demonstrate the multisemiotic affiliative and distancing strategies that were put to use as Instagrammers (people who post content to Instagram) convened with each other around the federal election. I explore the gains and losses of employing different methodologies (e.g. using van Leeuwen’s (2008) social actor networks, or using corpus linguistic software to interrogate the verbal text – see Caple 2018a) and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of examining words and images separately and then together as a ‘modal ensemble’ (Kress 2010: 162). The findings not only show that Instagram, like other social media, functions as a barometer of public opinion (Caple 2018b), but also demonstrate the sophisticated ways in which such public opinion is expressed multimodally (Caple forthcoming). Keywords: Affiliation, Instagram, Multimodality, Political Opinion References Caple, H. (2018a) Analysing the multimodal text. In C. Taylor & A. Marchi (Eds.), Corpus Approaches to Discourse: A Critical Review, pp. 85-109. London: Routledge. Caple, H. (2018b) ‘Lucy says today she is a Labordoodle’: How the Dog-of-Instagram reveal voter preferences. Social Semiotics. Ahead-of-print. DOI: 10.1080/10350330.2018.1443582. Caple, H. (forthcoming) Image-centric practices on Instagram: Subtle shifts in footing. In H. Stöckl, H. Caple & J. Pflaeging (Eds.), Shifts towards Image-centricity in Contemporary Multimodal Practices: Insights from Social Semiotic Approaches. London/New York: Routledge. Kress, G. (2010) Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication. London/New York: Routledge. van Leeuwen, T. J. (2008) Discourse and Practice - New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis. New York: Oxford University Press

Flagging discourses of change on Australia Day: How a nation remembers

Australia Day is a national public holiday in Australia. It is celebrated on a date that is increasingly controversial, namely the arrival of the First Fleet of British ships in New South Wales. Recent years have seen an emerging debate about the date on which the public holiday is celebrated, with numerous protests and a movement towards changing the date. In this presentation, I examine how both traditional news discourse (newspapers) and social media discourse (Instagram) engage in the discursive struggle around Australia Day, with a particular focus on how visuals contribute to the discussion. I draw on the theoretical concepts of bonding (Stenglin 2004; Martin & Stenglin 2007), iconization (Martin & Stenglin 2007; Tann 2010) and affiliation (Martin 2010) to analyse how both the Australian and Aboriginal flags are used in visual news reporting and in Instagram posts and the extent to which they contribute to discourses of change. References Martin, J.R., & Stenglin, M. (2007). Materializing reconciliation: negotiating difference in a transcolonial exhibition. In T. Royce & W. Bowcher (Eds.), New Directions in the Analysis of Multimodal Discourse (pp. 215-226). Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Martin, J.R. (2010). Semantic variation: Modelling realisation, instantiation and individuation in social semiosis. In M. Bednarek & J.R. Martin (Eds.), New Discourse on Language: Functional Perspectives on Multimodality, Identity, and Affiliation (pp. 1-34). London: Continuum. Stenglin, M. (2004). Packaging curiosities towards a grammar of three-dimensional space. Unpublished Thesis (PhD), University of Sydney, Sydney. Tann, K. (2010). Semogenesis of a nation: An iconography of Japanese identity. Unpublished Thesis (PhD), University of Sydney, Sydney

Delving into the discourse: approaches to news values in journalism studies and beyond

This working paper explores the extensive literature on the study of news values within Journalism and Media Studies and teases out the many different approaches to news values analysis