Record Details

Climate Change Photographs in Online Newspapers: A Visual Content Analysis

NOPR - NISCAIR Online Periodicals Repository

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Field Value
 
Title Climate Change Photographs in Online Newspapers: A Visual Content Analysis
 
Creator PARVEEN, HUMA
 
Subject Climate Change
Online Newspapers
Gender
Photographs
Visual Content Analysis
 
Description 10-33
Climate change has emerged as the most pressing concern for
humankind, given the rapidly depleting natural resources and
burgeoning issues of pollution and waste posing a grave threat to
the planet’s survival. While the magnitude of the problem has
grown exponentially, there has also been a slight increase in the
quantum of discussion on climate change in social circles. News
media bear the onus of not only reporting on climate change to
spread awareness, but they’re in fact educators for a large part of
the population. Photographs embedded in news stories have a
profound effect on the audiences in that they immediately reduce
the distance between the readers and ground zero. These
photographs are chosen with great precision by editors, in order to
evoke the desired sentiment. These news photographs can also
have far-reaching effects on the promotion of gender equality,
which is a key concern in sustainable development.
Objective: The present study has been designed to conduct a
visual content analysis of photographs incorporated in climate
change news stories in mainstream online newspapers in India.
Online newspapers have been incorporated owing to the growing
propensity of a large populace to receive their news through
digital devices like smart phones, laptops and tablets. It would
help in examining the climate change imagery being employed by
online newspapers, which goes a long way in shaping readers’
perceptions about the burning issue.
Methodology: The newspapers chosen are the online editions of
The Hindu, The Hindustan Times, and The Times of India,
keeping in view their wide reach and popularity. The newspapers
are scanned for climate change stories over a period of two
months (December 2020 and January 2021) with the analysis. The stories with keywords ‘climate’, ‘climate change’ or
‘global warming’ in the headline or lead paragraph were selected
for data collection.
The corpus of images thus obtained is quantified and analysed
to ascertain the depiction of gender in terms of activity. Further,
the data is scrutinised from several perspectives, ranging from
analysing gender representation in the stories from various
sources (internal staff, or national/international news agencies) to
the spectrum of topics covered.
Implications: The study follows a unique approach as it inspects
the climate change imagery along several dimensions not
undertaken hitherto by any other study. It would also be pertinent
to understand the visual representation of gender in people’s daily
dose of online news, which has strong agenda-setting influences
on society.
 
Date 2023-03-22T10:25:59Z
2023-03-22T10:25:59Z
2023-03
 
Type Article
 
Identifier 2278-2796 (Online); 2278-2788 (Print)
http://nopr.niscpr.res.in/handle/123456789/61579
https://doi.org/10.56042/jst.v10i3.68674
 
Language en
 
Publisher CSIR-NIScPR
 
Source JST Vol.11(1) [January-March 2023]