In the social media age, we are inundated with visual information — yet we know very little about how and why these images are made, especially in journalistic contexts. This can be a huge barrier to establishing trust between visual journalists, their subjects, and the people who consume their work. Dr. T.J. Thomson is a […]

Photojournalists have not fared well in recent years. In some newsrooms, entire photojournalism staffs have been eliminated. Publishers concerned about the bottom line may reason that photojournalism is a dying art. After all, smartphones are abundant and can be used to create high-quality images. But are photos from non-professionals as compelling as those produced by […]

Experimenting with visual storytelling formats can allow a newsroom to rise above the clutter by taking a fresh angle to news topics. Last January, The New York Times did that by launching Welcome to the New World, a fully reported graphic narrative. It is the first series of its kind, according to editor Bruce Headlam. […]

A former Wall Street banker, Arnade quit his cushy gig, and now his full-time, poorly-paid gig is driving his light-blue minivan around the country to photograph its poorest places. His photos and articles are regularly published on The Guardian, but his primary outlet remains social media, where he posts photos, comments, rants, and thoughts often […]

MapHub is a free, online tool that can help create interactive maps to accompany stories. Users can import their own data into MapHub, or search by location. MapHub also includes text labels, the ability to add multiple points of interest, and including routes between locations on the map. Journalism.co.uk’s Mădălina Ciobanu outlines how to use […]

In the last year, New York Magazine has focused on translating the visual nature of the magazine to Instagram, with its @nymag account going from 190,000 followers to more than 475,000 followers. The social media team meets with the photo department to talk about the print magazine’s cover art and other elements that could translate […]

Mashable’s Raymond Wang rounds up some useful Instagram features even the most seasoned Instagrammers may not be using. Some useful features for news organizations: Link other social media accounts to Instagram to share posts throughout your network, select your own cover image for Instagram videos to get more clicks, and use Instagram’s standalone apps for […]

Using data from Google Analytics, the NPR visuals team analyzed how people interact with its stories and what elements get people to finish reading (or watching) a story. The lessons from their analysis: Clear calls to action that tell the reader to do something, like “go” or “begin,” have higher start rates, and people were […]

Fusion’s Political Image Machine captures every image the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates post on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, a process that Fusion has automated. Fusion is using a product called Clarifai to assign automatic tags to the almost 70,000 images, which uses a deep learning algorithm and allows images to be added in real-time. […]

After delivering more than a million pre-assembled cardboard virtual reality viewers to readers, The New York Times wants people to see its first virtual reality film “The Displaced” as “the moment when VR went mainstream.” NYT says the launch of its virtual reality app was the most successful NYT app launch ever, with more downloads […]