Inside Out — An appraisal of journalism education from a visual communication perspective

Gudrun Frommherz & Matthew Guinibert, 2016

This paper presents some observations about journalism’s move to digital, and the challenges that this places on journalism educators. We propose that, against the assumption journalist’s digital education is well underway, some key foundation skills have largely been overlooked — in particular those relating to visual literacy.

Our point of view is that the move to digital — as important and relevant it is — cannot succeed if journalism education does not, and quickly so, include visual communication into its curriculum. Hence, we recommend to turn journalism education “inside out”, that is to peel the digital skill’s onion, and recognize that at its very heart, digital education is VISUAL above anything else.

Let’s take an example:

On Friday 25 July 2014, a young Israeli soldier was killed in a firefight with Hamas gunmen in the Gaza Strip. This incident was reported in the New Zealand Herald because the casualty was born in New Zealand to a Kiwi father, and he had lived in the country as a baby. The New Zealand Herald — a with a readership of more than 800,000 people a week — published the story in its hard copy edition and on its online website on the Monday morning with this photograph.

The image assumingly depicting the dead soldier Guy Boland was however a photo of the American actor, Ryan Dunn, popular through the Jackass television series. The NZH had taken the photograph from the dead soldier’s Facebook page believing it to be him. Guy Boland was a fan of the actor — and there was a certain likeness between Guy and Ryan. Unsurprisingly, this case of mistaken identity blew up, and the Herald went into a damage control spin. The subsequent discourse in the journalism community largely regarded this incident a case of “information sourcing error” related to a digital.

From what we know, the journalist had spoken to the deceased’s parents who pointed them to their son’s Facebook page. The journalist sourced several photos from FB and forwarded these to the picture editor. Both, the journalist and the picture editor, did not feel the need to verify the authenticity of the photos, and neither of them noticed anything “odd” with the one particular image that subsequently went to print.

The Herald’s “information sourcing error” rationale does explain a lot about the POTENTIAL risks in source verification. It explains HOW the image was confused. However, it does NOT explain WHY a wrong image was picked in the first place. WHY from all the available images on the Facebook page it was Dunn’s photograph that the picture editor selected? WHY this image and none of the others?

From a Visual Communication perspective, this was not an “error” but the “laws of vision” at work. None of actual photos of the soldier could compete against the visual power of the purposefully shot photograph of the actor. The journalist apparently could not distinguish between the visual language of a professionally shot photo and the snapshot character of the other images. Further, the journalist was not visually literate enough to read the facial features and realise that these were the photos of two different persons.

In a similar incident, “Pedo bear”, a character from a lewd visual meme that satires paedophilic content was mistaken for a 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics mascot and printed in a Polish newspaper.

The Pedobear and pals image was created as a critique of the mascot characters. This image gained popularity due to the satirical use of a lewd character and became a one of the top search results when googling images for the 2010 winter Olympic mascots.

If you have never heard of this meme — Pedo bear or Kuma has been around since 2003 and appeared in various incarnations and contexts. Originally it was used by forum moderators to flag pornographic content.

In recent years the bear transformed into a symbol of pedophilia and loita complex. Now it is widely accepted as a satirical mascot for paedophilia. This is not something you would ever want associated with mascots aimed at children.

How could these errors occur? And: What exactly were these errors? The NZ Herald example was treated as an error in “information sourcing”. The “Pedo bear” mishaps was possibly an even more severe error in source identification. In both cases, the real error did not lie with sourcing or verification as such — but with the much more primary inability by the journalists to identify visual clues.

Although both images are cropped to the approx. same framing and 3/4 oblique orientation, they are considerably different in lighting, sharpness, colour brilliance, and gaze direction. In particular, the Dunn image exhibits a professional ‘angle of engagement’ with the upper body and gaze directed towards the viewer. The posture is further enhanced by directed lighting — unlike the flat light in the Boland photo.

Likewise, in the Pedo example, composited from the characters above, significant differences in style were apparently overlooked: Perspectivity, subject orientation, and graphical depth are all different between the two image sources. The Pedo bear graphic clearly attempts perspectival depth through shading and foreshortening — elements missing on the mascot image.

What does any of this mean for journalism education? First, one of the big challenges for Journalism in the 21st Century is the transfer to digital.

Journalism education struggles to catch up on a digital reality. Journalism educators around the world strive to identify digital skills that are essential for journalists to work in a digital environment and to optimise digital opportunities. Digital Literacy has become a guideline and a contested area of journalism education as a result.

What, however, exactly is digital literacy? According to this earlier definition by Gilster (1997), digital literacy emphasised the technical knowledge of deploying relevant technologies.

Which was later defined as the ability to interpret media.

Which subsequently shifted to the skill of appreciating underlying societal issues brought on by ‘digital’.

From the evolution of the definitions of “digital literacy”, we can see a broadening of the concept to move from technology skills to the construction of meaning, to community engagement, and an increasing understanding of the ubiquitous nature of digital interaction on social life.

However, despite this evolved understanding of digital literacy — or literacies — digital journalism is commonly associated with simply ‘more’ and, particularly, ‘faster’.

Although there is a shift from technology skills alone to media, societal, and creative skills, digital journalism education still seems to struggle with the cycle of adapting technologies to become and function as communication media.

If we look at the present objectives, goals and pedagogies of digital journalism education, there is a notable focus on the teaching of digital skills for the purposeful use of digital technologies as media — in the contexts to events and currents in society, above all else the exercising of democracy.

The teaching of critical thinking skills is often declared a primary pedagogic objective.

Storytelling skills across platforms, critical thinking, transferability of skills, field-relevance, and “soft” skills such as team work and collaboration have been identified as key journalistic proficiencies (see, e.g., Edwin, L. Artzt, Dean of the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon, May 2016).

However, on closer scrutiny, much of journalism education (often unwillingly and unknowingly) focuses on the delivery of technology-literacies rather than a more inclusive digital literacy. Teaching and learning of tools often takes priority over learning transferable foundation skills. The focus is on learning to use digital media over exploring how these media open up new journalistic opportunities in particular and redefine societies more generally.

Of the 25 Essential Skills for Student Journalists (College Media Matters, 2012) more than half are technology-oriented, i.e., deal with digital production and/or delivery formats.

A comparison of 30 digital journalism education syllabi in the US showed these ‘new skills’ at the focus of what they claim to be a 21st century-proof journalism education.

Studies such as Poynter’s Core Skills for the future of Journalism show data that may also hint at this. We can see students and educators weigh the summary of technical skills (HTML, video shooting & editing , audio) as above the ability to tell stories with design and visuals. Interestingly, professionals overall seem to give less weight to technical skills overall than educators.

It appears that journalism as a professional practice has not yet fully embraced the recognition that journalism is a constructive discipline that needs to create visual messages the same way they create written new messages. Because images are largely considered documents (proof, records, or evidence) by journalists, visual production is not deemed a fundamental practice in journalism. Consequently, visual literacy and visual communication are not recognised as central foundation skills in journalistic education.

Instead of ‘more’ and ‘faster’, we propose that an emphasis on visual literacy proficiencies is required to deal with digital news production. These skills include spatial thinking, “all at once reading” of information, multi-code and multi-node analysis, and visual intelligence.

So, what does the term ‘visual literacy’ describe? It includes the ability to read and ‘write’ with images. Or put in other terms, synthesise and encode as well as analyse and decode images.

Most common visual literacy definitions include five core components: visual perception, visual language, visual learning, visual thinking, and visual communication. For one to be considered visually literate, one must have a grasp on all five components.

Journalism traditionally did not consider itself a “constructive”, creative practice. Visual and artistic skills were not deemed essential.

Objectivity and truthfulness are two of the very essential principles of journalism. Hence, images are treated as objective documents and truthful evidence — a fallacy, we may argue, when considering images.

To highlight some of these myths we have a number of different newspapers front pages — all covering the Orlando night club shooting in 2016.

Same image, different framing. The cropping of the image, removing visual context, dramatises the message.

Image size and placement matters for emphasising a leading, overall, message.

We can see the similar ideas communicated visually as the same source is used, but the intonation or way its said differs, setting a different connotation and context of the event.

The way in which lighting, contrast, colour, cropping and skewing of the same image is applied may create a — sometimes substantially — different message.

Variations of the very “same” image — all of which have different emotive and communicative affect.

Rules for World Press photo standards state:

When we want pictures to record and inform us of the varied events, issues, people, and viewpoints in our world, there are limits to how pictures can be made.

Rule 9 states the contest is for single frame, single exposure pictures. This means multiple exposures, polyptychs (diptychs, triptychs, etc.), stitched panoramas (either produced in-camera or with image editing software), and pictures with text added within the frame, are not eligible.

Rule 10 — revised for 2016 — states ‘the content of a picture can not be altered by adding, rearranging, reversing, distorting or removing people and/or objects from within the frame.’ There are two exceptions to this: (i) cropping that removes extraneous details is permitted; (ii) sensor dust or scratches on scans of negatives can be removed.

What is relevant here is that we exclude the visible text, is that all these varied photos taken from the same source fall within these limits and therefore would be considered records, despite them all being different.

Another example — the Paris terror attacks in November 2015.

In particular pay attention to the two front EMT workers’ faces.

Are they terrified? Panicked? Sick? Heroically battling on?

Through colour, saturation, and contrast, different readings can be made.

The treatment of the background through blur, saturation, colour balance, and cropping also changes the reading of urgency or ‘speed’ of the photo.

The following examples show that even if candid shots equalled truth — the images are not making it to print without first being altered, which alters the narrative.

A well recognisable face at this time and place in history. The yellow hair due — highlighting what is discussed as a cast by a hair product — was an incidental colour artefact introduced by digital technology during the photo shoot. Unintentionally, the hair piece became an eye catcher and was automatically associated with the popular hair meme circulating through the internet.

The Trump hair meme. Note that the yellow case (whether ‘natural’ or an artefact by photography) has been reduced here to match the corn silk.

Maybe, the association with the hair meme was intended. If not, a simple image edit educing the accidental colour saturation, would have avoided — or at least weakened — a further promotion of the hair meme.

Trump’s appearance on NBC. What word did the letters in the background form? “future”?, “fun”?, “f***”?! The latter reading is encouraged in context to other Trump images with an animated body language. Journalists need to be aware that we are reading images in the context to other images seen elsewhere.

And here: Is the “kick in the head” by the overpowering letter ‘A’ America’s answer to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign? How are we to read this image? Are we to notice the primary image subject only and not the setting that includes oddly interacting secondary visuals?

What we have tried to demonstrate here is that images are not simply “documents”, “evidence”, or “records”. They are constructs.

The smallest visual change may result in a huge shift in meaning, contexts, associations. This is because images are inherently contextual — they trigger associations and recall other images from our visual memory. These associations are not a rational process — but can be trained and practiced.

Visual Communication is the discipline of visual intentionality. It provides the skills, language, mind, and techniques to optimise visual meaning. It co-ordinates contexts and uses the visual associative mind to support a visual message and not to subvert, undermine, or disrupt intended meaning.

How do we learn visual literacy skills?

There are many models that describe the process as a circular reference — this particular one is from Paul Martin-Lester. It shows us we need outside interjections of knowledge and guidance to learn these skills. It also shows that as a circular reference, knowledge acquisition in this domain requires prior scaffolds and builds upon itself each time it is undertaken.

This creates some barriers. First, learning visual literacies is not a fast process. It often takes lifelong learning. Teaching visual literacies requires knowledge and practices from outside journalism. Learning of visual literacy is not readily targeted to journalism education as yet.

When looking at digital journalism education, we need to recognise that Visual Literacy is an essential pillar of Digital Literacy.

We propose that media professionals — including the profession of journalism — must be offered a sound visual literacy eduction, which is primary to digital skills. Only visually confident journalism can prevent unintentional misinformation created by unaware image presentation.

References:

College Media Matters (2012). 25 Essential Skills for Student Journalists. http://www.collegemediamatters.com/2012/06/22/25-essential-skills-for-student-journalists-in-2012/

Finberg, H. I. & Klinger, L. (2014). Core Skills for the Future of Journalism. Poynter. https://www.poynter.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/CoreSkills_FutureofJournalism2014v2.pdf

Hortin, J. (1983). Visual literacy and visual thinking. In L. Burbank L. & D. Pett (Eds.), Contributions to the Study of Visual Literacy. IVLA, 92–106.

Hsieh, Y. (2012). Online social networking skills: The social affordances approach to digital inequality. First Monday, 17(4). doi:10.5210/fm.v17i4.3893, http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3893/3192

Jones-Kavalier, B. R. & Flannigan, S. L. (n.d.). Connecting the Digital Dots: Literacy of the 21st Century; http://connect.educause.edu/Library/EDUCAUSE+Quarterly/ConnectingtheDigitalDotsL/39969

Lester, P. M. (2011). Images that Injure. Third edition. Praeger.

Lester, P. M. (2013). Visual Communication: Images with Messages. Sixth edition. Wadsworth Publishing.