Punctuating the home page: image as language in an online newspaper

Abstract

Between February 2002 and April 2006, the Sydney Morning Herald online [www.smh.com.au], an influential Australian newspaper which went online in 1995, showed a remarkable degree of change in the design of its home page. However, over the same time period, the use of images in hard-news stories on its home page was remarkably consistent, both diachronically and synchronically. These hard-news images are small `thumbnails', and are most typically close crops of faces. Their small size, their consistent and limited subject matter, and their positioning in news stories represent a new practice in hard-news reporting, and raise questions about the role they play in the multimodal story-telling practices of the newspaper, and about the discursive practices of online newspapers more generally. This article presents an analysis of these thumbnails using tools from systemic functional semiotics, and an investigation from three socio-historical perspectives (news photography, typography, and punctuation). On this basis, I argue that in the specific discursive context of the home page of the Sydney Morning Herald online during the time period studied, thumbnails function less as images and more as an expression of the expanding system of language in computer-mediated communication.

Issues in the education of TESOL teachers by distance education

“…These changes have posed fundamental challenges for the entire field of language education. New computer-mediated contexts of interaction have given rise not only to new environments in which language is used, but also to new forms of language (see Knox, 2009;Lemke, 2002;Piriyasilpa, 2007).…”

"The Semantics of Migration". Translation as Transduction: Remaking Meanings Across Modes

“…Common practices in newsrooms have been radically transformed in digital newsrooms by the increasingly massive participation of freelancers and different distribution of tasks (see Robinson 2011 andCaple 2013). Production practices in text composition should be bore in mind to account for the fi nal result in digital textuality, that is always the effect of multiple authors, from those who write and those who produce pictures or visual materials to those who fabricate the fi nal digital remediated artefact, including the work of reporters, chief editors, web, news, and chief sub-editors, who work with designers, picture editors, layout sub-editors, and text sub-editors (see Knox 2007Knox , 2009.…”

“…That online newspaper articles are specifi c multimodal artefacts incorporating a wealth of semiotic resources is nothing new, as research literature has shown (Knox 2007(Knox , 2009Bednarek/Caple 2012Djonov/ Knox 2014). For example, Caple argues that research in news was almost exclusively focused on verbiage, but a growing interest in visual communication has changed this tendency.…”

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