Journalism Employability in the Modern Newsroom: Insights From Applicant Resumes and Cover Letters

What skills, attributes, and experiences are needed for a visual journalism job in a contemporary print and digital newsroom? Previous attempts at answering this question examine it through insights from hiring managers or news editors, often collected retrospectively or at arbitrary times of the year through surveys; analyses of position descriptions, which are often framed in normative terms; or through analyzing journalism curricula, which perpetually struggle to adapt nimbly to evolving industry demands. This signaling theory study adopts a novel approach by examining, through qualitative thematic analysis, all applicants’ resumes and cover letters submitted by candidates for a visual journalism job posted in 2019. The hiring organization sought a candidate who could not only tell newsworthy stories through images but also one who could “write their own stories,” “have strong organizational skills,” and be “knowledgeable about current digital technology and applications for smartphone photography.” The results provide insight into the types of applicants who apply to such a position; the skills, attributes, and experiences employers regard as worthy of shortlisting; and the strategies candidates adopted in addressing the position description and selection criteria.

Aesthetic practices in the climate crisis: Intervening in consensual frameworks of the sensible through images

Previous research has shown that Western visual journalism has represented climate change through certain repetitive and stereotypical imagery mainly consisting of catastrophic images of climate change impacts, images depicting technological causes and solutions, and images of politicians and activists. This imagery has proven to be distant, abstract, and ineffective in motivating personal engagement with climate change. In this article, we claim that visual journalism's representations of climate change are rooted in the consensual frameworks of human-centredness and consumption-centredness. Leaning on Jacques Ranciére's notion of “the politics of aesthetics”, we aim to challenge these frameworks. We suggest, with examples from visual arts, four aesthetic practices which could intervene in these frameworks: 1) revealing connectedness, 2) recognising agency, 3) compromising the attractions of consumerism, and 4) illuminating alternatives. We propose that visual representations, renewed through these aesthetic practices, could have an effect on how people connect to climate issues and imagine possibilities for agency in the climate crisis. Implementing these aesthetic practices would entail shifts in the sphere of visual journalism.

Journalism’s visual construction of place in environmental coverage

This study builds on our understanding of how visual journalism is used with environmental reporting to create a sense of place and understanding. Although most American photojournalism tends to favor close-up photos with people, environmental coverage leans opposite: sweeping landscape photos devoid of people. However, our content analysis of wire and non-wire environmental photos on U.S. newspaper front pages shows support that person-focused feature imagery is being used more, though mostly at an informational level.

Speed, subjectivity and visual conventions in ethnographic reportage drawings

Reportage drawing is a way of visual journalism and records opinions as well as observation. In ethnographic fieldwork, reportage drawing has been used as a method of visually documenting ethnographic discoveries. The question is: what are the most significant skills that a reportage drawing artist need to effectively document visual materials? This paper proposes three important skills: speed-drawing, understanding of subjectivity, and appropriate use of conventions. Speed-drawing is essential for on-location settings to help quickly capture important aspects of moving subjects. Understanding the influence of subjectivity is important in an ethnographic setting, as it helps the artist to realize what cultural characteristics are valuable from their point of view so they can quickly decide what to record and what to omit in a fast-paced reportage setting. Applying conventions makes it easier to translate three-dimensional scenes into two-dimensional drawings and can also be used to add more information, but needs to be used wisely to avoid loss of crucial visual data. With practice-based research as core methodology, this project justifies the proposed argument with the analysis of my own reportage drawing practice, including both the process and the outcome.

“Symbolic photographs” as floating and empty signifiers

The article discusses the use of “symbolic photographs” – images in news reporting which have no direct connection to reported events – in news reporting. Such images deviate not only from the self-professed journalistic norm of factual reporting but also fundamentally challenge the act of civic eyewitnessing constitutive for visual journalism. Concepts of floating and empty signifiers from Discourse Theory are applied to “symbolic photographs” to analyse their ambivalent act of signification, their particular mode of iconicity and, by extension, the journalistic and political implications of their repetitive use.

Photography and Illustration

This chapter examines press images as an interaction between visual and technological/ economic constraints and opportunities of print technology in dialogue with other mediums of mass communication throughout the twentieth century, including an account of different workers and their expertise in visual production such as printers, graphic designers, art directors or commercial photographers. The opening question was why and how news images (initially technically challenging and expensive) have only gained in importance across the twentieth century. In addition, the narrative scope across Britain and Ireland in this collected press history allowed this chapter to engage with the role of news images in processes of nation building since the rise of Irish independence and to offer a different analysis from other accounts of visual journalism in press history, which may be either more general in scope, or focused on one specific time or place. Instead, the chapter examined diverging practices under the local cultural conditions developing in Ireland (South and North) and Great Britain, and the role of images within the ‘imagined communities’ sketched by particular publications as varied as Picture Post or An Phoblacht.

Epilogue

The Epilogue explores key events in the late 1890s as newspapers transitioned from illustrations to photographs, revisiting the familiar point of origin for sensational or “yellow” journalism. With the emphasis on images firmly established, news “art” (i.e., photos or illustrations) increasingly determined coverage of events, and sometimes transformed reporting itself. Whether publishing stories about a Cuban rebel heroine (Evangelina Cosio y Cisneros), or the sinking of the U.S.S. Maine, the World, the Journal, and other dailies re-set standards for news visualization. Their practices incorporated parameters, established over previous decades, that had changed how consumers came to see the news. Even as interpretive news illustrations faded, the conventions of visual journalism they had established remained firmly in place.

Graphic News

This book explores sensationalism as it took hold of U.S. media between 1870 and 1900. During this period, print news publishers became adept at translating stories about sex, crime, and violence into emotion-based pictures. Analysis of significant episodes in media history shows how a range of news media producers engaged with the sensational style. As they pioneered the art of visual journalism, news publishers conveyed racial, class, and gender anxieties in a complex dialogue with audiences that established precedents for modern media. Prominent cases – obscenity litigation, anti-Chinese violence, the Ghost Dance, Jim Crow-era lynching, and domestic violence – demonstrate how efforts to maximize the dramatic power of the news transformed everyday reporting and established standards for visual journalism. Commercial newspaper editors exploited sensationalism’ economic benefits, while marginalized groups and social activists experimented with its power to challenge negative stereotyping and mobilize their own constituencies. By the 1890s, a wide range of publications had come to embrace, adapt, and expand the sensational style through news illustration – albeit in different ways for different audiences. The patterns prevalent in entertainment publications infiltrated the commercial dailies, and even low-budget political news sheets: few publications could afford to resist borrowing from the sensational toolkit. As sensationalism increasingly pervaded visual journalism, the very nature of the news changed.