Mary Angela Bock

Visual communication theory and research: A mass communication perspective

1. Linking Theory to Visual Communication 2. Historical Research 3. Who: Research on the Sources of Visual Communication 4. Says What: Research on the Content in Visual Communication 5. To Whom: Research on the Audiences in Visual Communication 6. In Which Channel: Research on Media Used in Visual Communication 7. With What Effect I: Research on Cognitive Effects of Visual 8. With What Effect II: Research on Attitudinal Effects of Visual 9. With What Effect III: Research on Behavioral Effects of Visual 10. Conclusions

Newspaper journalism and video: Motion, sound, and new narratives

Video has become a key component for multi-media newspaper websites. Working with video is often a new skill for print-based journalists, who previously may have considered it the province of television news organizations. Institutional convention has held up television news as a foil to still images and the printed word, a dualism that has fostered hierarchal thinking about video and its normative role in journalism. Such hierarchal thinking, or what Pierre Bourdieu discussed in terms of distinction, is often reflected in institutional, automatic, unconscious daily practices. This study looks through Bourdieu’s lens at a set of observational and interview data to describe the way journalists in newspaper organizations are adopting video for presenting news. The study finds that newspaper journalists, both writers and still photojournalists, are responding in ways that allow them to claim a distinct form of multi-media presentation, thereby sustaining their place in the traditional journalistic hierarchy.

Hands Up, Don’t Shoot, Whose Side Are You On? Journalists Tweeting the Ferguson Protests

This article represents a qualitative analysis of the Twitter feed from one news organization during the first phase of protests in Ferguson, Missouri, after the shooting of Michael Brown in 2014. The tweets, images, and videos from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch journalists constitute a real-time record as the protests unfolded. By applying a strand of framing theory known as the protest paradigm, the analysis discovered that journalists’ tweeting marganalized protesters and framed police officers as dispassionate protectors of social order. Journalists’ tweeting of protesters took on a more sympthatic tone when they both were subjected to police tear gas.These findings have implications for the coverage of race, violence, and protests in the United States as well as the way Twitter binds and represents an interpretive community.

Showing versus telling: Comparing online video from newspaper and television websites

Video has become a central part of news on the web. As an emerging form of news, news videos are appearing with varied narrative structures, styles and formats. Narrative structure is one way that journalists establish discursive authority. Because of contrasting traditions regarding visual news, newspaper videos might be expected to employ different narrative strategies. This content analysis compared the narrative structure of videos posted by newspaper websites with those posted by television organizations. It finds that form reflects contrasting traditions, with newspaper videos taking a more mimetic (showing) approach and television websites using a more diegetic (telling) narrative style.

Facing the Death Penalty While Facing the Cameras

This case study of a capital murder trial explores the way television journalism work routines shape trial coverage. Based on field observations, textual analysis and open-ended interviews, it examines how television news routines are translated into the stories that are broadcast and posted to the Web. The interviews and fieldwork made it possible to connect the way gatekeeping and the source–journalist relationship affect the framing of the stories produced. The project also evaluates the process and product according to normative expectations for US journalism. The analysis suggests that video news-gathering routines for trials rely heavily on law-enforcement sources, granting considerable control for the storys framing to those authorities.

Badges? Who needs them? Police press credential policies, professionalism, and the new media environment

This article examines shifts in one marker of professionalism for journalists as reflected in the police press pass system. Credentials can be interpreted both as a mark of occupational membership and as token that grants journalists access. Based on a census of 100 American police departments and interviews with representatives from those departments, we find that police credentialing policies are changing, in part because the new media environment has blurred journalism’s professional boundaries. Our analysis draws from Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, which suggests that institutional practices such as police department credentialing reproduce social hierarchies and power structures. Using this lens, we argue that credentials are losing their value as professional status symbols while becoming increasingly important for geophysical access.

The voice of lived experience: mobile video narratives in the courtroom

ABSTRACT Video is overtaking other modes of communication in new media. Whether from a smartphone, a wearable device or surveillance camera, video is being made, stored and shared in unprecedented ways. Once the exclusive territory of institutions becomes large enough to finance video production and its storytelling power, technology’s contemporary democratization is changing the landscape of visual narrative. This project explores the discursive nature of video based on a case study of a courtroom trial that was both about the legality of filming crime scenes and the evidentiary use of videos from crime scenes. This unique intersection of surveillance, counter-surveillance, word and image, body and text allows for deeper understanding of how video serves human purposes. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and textual analysis, we build upon Walter Fisher’s narrative paradigm by identifying significant attributes of unedited, evidentiary video that distinguish it from other forms of visual documentation. Raw video’s hard-edged timeline presents narrative coherence in a way that resists discursive contextualization. This has important implications for public policy and citizen-generated video evidence.

Mastering the Mug Shot

This project uses a case study of an elected official’s booking mug shot to examine the way political actors engage in embodied performance to maintain their image in visual media. Mug shots are images that are ostensibly equalizing and represent a long-standing link between law enforcement, journalism and visual culture. Released through the “gates” of law enforcement, they are imbued with a connotation of guilt even though they are created prior to a person’s conviction. Using mixed methods, including textual analysis, field observations and interviews, this case study examined the way journalists covered the mugshot booking of former Texas Governor Rick Perry. The event was widely proclaimed a victory rather than a ritual of shame. The study suggests that the governor and his staff engaged in embodied gatekeeping by orchestrating the events leading up to his booking photo which impeded journalists in their effort to independently control their narratives.

Faith and reason: An analysis of the homologies of Black and Blue Lives Facebook pages

Highly publicized deaths of Black men during police encounters have inspired a renewed civil rights movement originating with a Twitter hashtag, “Black Lives Matter.” Supporters of the law enforcement community quickly countered with an intervention of their own, using the slogan, “Blue Lives Matter.” This project compared the discourses of their respective Facebook groups using cultural discourse analysis that considered words, images, and their symbiosis. Based on a foundation of structural Marxism as articulated by Althusser, this project found that the two groups’ symbol systems are homologous with larger, ideological tensions in American culture: faith and reason.

The faces of local TV news in America: youth, whiteness, and gender disparities in station publicity photos

Abstract TV news is a visual medium that requires its on-air journalists to look good, but a history of lawsuits and survey research suggests that this burden is spread unevenly. Critics charge that women are expected to look younger and sexier, and minority broadcasters are held to a White standard of beauty. This project investigated the reality behind those complaints by examining the faces of on-air journalists working for local stations in the US according to race, gender, and attractiveness. The resulting content analysis of more than 400 online publicity photos suggests that a certain look dominates for men and for women and that the range of appearance standards is wider for men than women.