ABSTRACT
This chapter first clarifies the concept of image-centricity by distinguishing between a semantic/rhetorical centrality and a perceptual/layout dominance of the image, arguing that both may give rise to centricity and unequal status in text-image relations, that is, anchorage. Second, a corpus-based multimodal genre analysis of current English/American and German newspapers practices corroborates qualitative and quantitative evidence for an entire Systemic Functional Linguistics genre family of image-centric news stories that share important general features but also differ in more specific aspects. Third, the chapter outlines, in the style of a systemic checklist, major levels and criteria of multimodal genre analysis suited to teasing apart potentially more and other image-centric news story genres, allowing finer distinctions and more extensive corpus work.
