Visual Journalism and Verification at War

Norwegian and Swedish News Outlets Covering Ukraine
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-032-76335-4
Verlag: Routledge

Buch, Englisch, 112 Seiten, Format (B × H): 145 mm x 222 mm, Gewicht: 285 g

Reihe: Disruptions

Considering the visual coverage of the war in Ukraine, this book provides critical insights into how newsrooms make use of visual materials, how visuals partake in journalistic storytelling in a modern wartime context, and how visual journalism practices affect the news media’s role as arbiter of accuracy and ethics.

Based on a mixed-methods study, including analyses of selected visually driven news stories and interviews with media professionals in Norwegian and Swedish national media outlets houses, this book examines the news media’s approach to the visual coverage of the war in Ukraine following Russian invasion in 2022. The work is theoretically underpinned by ongoing boundary work within journalism, and editorial negotiations over issues such as verification, source criticism, and trust; witnessing and ways of seeing; and ethical gatekeeping in photojournalism. At a juncture of rising concerns over AI, public distrust, and propaganda, this study adds a real-time aspect to these debates and reveals challenges as well as emerging strategies in the unfolding coverage. Furthermore, the comparative Scandinavian context serves to highlight points of tension between the global and the local; between those newsrooms relying on global image brokers and those conducting their own in-house reporting.

Written for researchers and advanced students of Visual Journalism and Conflict Reporting, this book is a timely intervention.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Nilsson, Maria

Simonsen, Anne Hege

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Fotografie Fotojournalismus
• Sozialwissenschaften Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaften Medienwissenschaften Journalismus & Presse

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of figues

List of tables

Acknowledgements



1. Disrupting the boundaries of photojournalism at war

A background to the full-scale invasion

Previous research on the war in Ukraine

Photojournalism at war, witnessing and visual meaning-making

Visual verification, trust and truth

Our empirical study

Empirical focus

Methods

Chapter outline

Funding and approvals

A note on our collaboration



2. Bridges and flows

Witnessing, networks and flows

Witnessing outbreak: Time, space and production in the field

Summary: random and deliberate coverage

Witnessing atrocities: the cases of Bucha and Borodyanka

Witnessing through tropes and conventions: Commemorating the invasion

Chapter summary: Witnessing through bridges and flows



3. The war next door: The perspectives of editors and photojournalists

Being there

The gap between seeing and showing

Safety, bias and trust

Chapter summary: About the coverage of the war next door



4. Truth, trust (and everything in between)

A hierarchy of trust

Skilling up (digital forensics)

Chapter summary: Fact-checking as a new genre



5. Reflections on the Norwegian and Swedish visual coverage of the war in Ukraine



References

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Maria Nilsson is Professor of Journalism in the Department of Media Studies at Stockholm University, Sweden. Her research interests include visual storytelling, newsroom routines, the ethics of witnessing, visual representations of crises, and the history of photography. Her current research focuses on visual verification practices and disinformation and the truth claims of journalism in crisis coverage.

Anne Hege Simonsen is Associate Professor and Head of Department of Journalism and Media Studies at Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway. Her research interests include visual journalism, global and international reporting, climate crisis and environment coverage, media and minorities, physical walls and boundaries, and non-fiction writing. She has written, edited, and contributed to several text books in journalism for the Norwegian market.