Design and journalism – challenges and opportunities: A dialogue between two cultures

Abstract

Communication has become increasingly multi-semiotic and particularly more visual. The shift from a culture dominated by texts to a visual culture is particularly observable in journalism. Besides images, design is coming into play as a crucial semiotic mode for making meaning. In news features, special reports, or data visualizations, we can find a rich and complex interplay of different semiotic modes, e.g., text, image, and layout, which constitute the meaning-making process. However, the multimodal interplay also entails tensions since design and journalism are different disciplines with different semiotic resources, practices, and ways of thinking. In our paper, we focus on the relationship between these two disciplines by using a multimodal approach for our empirical analysis based on social semiotics. In a case study, we will examine the role of design as a semiotic mode in journalistic artifacts and discuss challenges and opportunities of the relationship betw

Graphic Visualization in Printed Media: How Does the Use of Technology Influence Journalism Culture

“…The facts that journalist found has to be informed in visualization. Visual interpretation of the designer will enrich the research (Weber & Rall, 2016). In the making of infographic, the relation between journalist and graphic designer is very important (Cartwright, 2010, (Volsdal, 2011.…”

“…Responding to such condition, the landscape of media also changed. Technology development has changed the appearance of media by adding graphics to visualize news story even though still using text narration (Holton, Lewis, & Coddington, 2016;Küpper, 2015Küpper, , 2014Weber & Rall, 2016;Ghode, 2012;Schlichting, 2016). The visualization has some functions such as to communicate complex data (Wojtkowski & Wojtkowski, 2002in Segel & Heer, 2010, to illustrate, and clarify complicated data (Holsanova, Holmberg, & Holmqvist, 2008).…”

“…Sometimes a news story looks rigid, then it needs visualization to give emotional touch (Hanser, Kevitt, Lunney, & Condell, 2010). In present days, visualization is also important to shape meaning (Weber & Rall, 2016). The other functions of visualization are among others to depict news story, to support news story, overview function, and decorative function (Volsdal, 2011).…”

“…Hence, the making of journalism graphic should involve the journalist as a fact finder. It is the result of a close collaboration between a graphic designer, an illustrator, and two journalists (Weber & Rall, 2016). The involvement of journalists is needed to describe the story that will be visualized.…”

Data stories. Rethinking journalistic storytelling in the context of data journalism

“…Usually, data visualization plays a significant role in data stories (although it is also possible to build data stories on a purely textual and numeric basis). Like info-graphics, data stories can be described as multimodal hybrid artifacts that weave together numbers, words, images and design into a coherent whole (Weber, 2017;Kennedy, Hill, Aiello, & Allen, 2016;Cairo, 2016Cairo, , 2013Weber & Rall, 2016). The close relatedness of data visualization and data story might explain why these terms are often used synonymously by practitioners.…”