75 years of metajournalistic visual discourse on the cover of News Photographer magazine

Kyser Lough, Christopher Assaf, & Lexie Little (PhD Student). “75 years of metajournalistic visual discourse on the cover of News Photographer magazine,” paper accepted for presentation to the Visual Communication Studies division at the International Communication Association 2024 conference, Gold Coast.

Abstract: From 1946 to 2021, the National Press Photographers Association published a trade journal for its membership, News Photographer magazine. The magazine provided key information about the field of photojournalism while promoting and defining the values and standards of the profession. Taken as a whole, the approximately 850 magazine issues published over a 75-year period provide a historical perspective on how the NPPA communicated with its membership, especially in looking at what the editors chose to feature on the cover. As an interpretive community, photojournalism relies on discourse like this to help generate the definitions, boundaries and legitimization of photojournalism. This is especially true when looking at the covers of the magazine, which elevated particular items to prominent status for readers. Therefore, in this study, we use a visual discourse analysis to explore the content of these magazine covers as a form of metajournalistic discourse that signals the most important aspects of photojournalism to NPPA members.