ABSTRACT
A common concern for any news publication today is finding ways of attracting and holding a wider readership base. One way has been by using more and larger images interacting with surrounding text in different ways. However, this move to become more ‘popular’ through the use of visual material, especially photographs, has consequences for the presentation of ‘objective’ stories. It calls for more sophisticated analyses both of the meanings carried by news photos and of their interactions with accompanying verbal text. This chapter demonstrates how the tools of critical discourse analysis can be extended to do this, examining examples of prominent verbal-visual displays that introduce serious news feature stories in print and online broadsheets. Such displays comprise a prominent image or images, a main headline, caption, and subheadline, and can take up most of the front page of a weekly news review section of a print paper. The aim here is to show how meanings in the image and the surrounding verbiage, and in their interaction, attitudinally engage and position readers in respect to the ‘factual’ content.
