@?”: Authorship and newsroom image crediting practices on Instagram

Alex Scott & Kyser Lough (accepted). "@?": Authorship and newsroom image crediting practices on Instagram.” Journalism Practice. Abstract: Bylines have long been the standard practice of crediting news products to reporters, but visual journalists have had a more complicated history. Visual journalists’ authorship has historically been suppressed, due to photographers’ diminished role in newsrooms, the discourses devised to protect ‘objectivity,’ and the institutionalized routines of video journalism. Little research has focused on the crediting practices of visual journalism in the digital age, where native features of third-party platforms offer outlets a multitude of crediting options. Crediting practices are also one way news outlets can signal the authenticity of images from manipulated and synthetic media, which has proliferated in recent years. Contextualized within visual journalists’ struggles with authorship, this study analyzes news outlets’ practices of crediting images and video on Instagram. Using a nationally representative sample of newspaper, television, and digital news outlets (N=36), this study employs a content analysis (N=720) of Instagram posts to examine how news outlets credit visual journalists and what difference exist between them. The analysis indicates continued suppression of authorship for photojournalists, and even more so for video journalists. This study then explores the implications of this lack of crediting to trust and credibility in news in the age of synthetic media.