graphic images on social media a valuable way to make foreign news more accessible?

Is it 'too trivial' for complex geopolitical stories to use the same techniques as for horses that look like Miley Cyrus?

Some may scoff, but graphic images on social media could be a valuable way to make foreign news more accessible

Emily Bell

Unease about the sudden interest in Ukrainian politics prompted Politico to run a column headlined “The day we pretended to care about Ukraine”.

I am sitting in a cafe in Williamsburg, the fashionable quarter of Brooklyn – New York's Shoreditch without the sense of humour or the excellent curry. A young video journalist is talking to me about the future of conflict coverage. He shows me a high-definition, slow-motion video on his phone of a boy on a skateboard performing aerial tricks. The pin-sharp definition is striking. "Now imagine," he says, "that instead of a skateboard, this is someone firing an AK-47, you see the impact, the recoil, everything." I do indeed imagine this, and recoil myself, just a little bit.

The ability to generate startling images from conflict is not new. However the ubiquity, number available and "quality" of those images have exponentially increased, as has the number of social platforms that distribute them. Instagram, Vine, even Snapchat are appealing to news organisations for their reach into different, new audiences.

Last week there were images of violence and conflict from the streets of Kiev, Caracas and – if you cared to look thoroughly enough on YouTube – from Syria too. In particular the Ukraine protests produced arresting visuals, set against the dramatic architecture of the city, blues and greys contrasting with the flashes of orange and red as fires blazed and gunfire was exchanged.

The drama of the pictures was not quite enough for the (London) Times which drew criticism for "brightening" an image on its front page. Uneasiness about the sudden interest in Ukrainian politics prompted Politico to run a column by Sarah Kendzior headlined "The day we pretended to care about Ukraine". The piece rounded on the "apocalypsticle" in general and Buzzfeed in particular (hardly surprising given Politico's direct competition with Buzzfeed's increasingly impressive editorial presence). "What does it mean for Ukrainians? Few apocalypsticle authors pose the question, because the only relevant question is what it means for them: traffic. Ask not what Buzzfeed can do for Ukrainians, but what dying Ukrainians can do for Buzzfeed," asserted Kendzior, who had either not been reading Buzzfeed's excellent and extensive coverage of the crisis, or was choosing to ignore it and focus on the photos.

The overall point Kendzior made is as old as the use of conflict images themselves: don't just look at the pictures, read the context. The broader question lurking here is whether there is such a thing as "the wrong kind of attention".

Is it "too trivial" for complex geopolitical stories to use the same techniques used to list examples of horses that look like Miley Cyrus? This is a perverse reaction to an interesting phenomenon: the remaking of an effective tabloid press. Media that aims to be accessible, that seeks to engage and inform people outside elites, has a valuable mission. Engagement with Ukrainian politics might begin and end with a "disaster porn" slideshow nine times out of 10, but what of the tenth individual who goes on to read more? For younger audiences or those disengaged from the mainstream media, one thing is sure: that the exploration of an alien topic will very rarely start with a 5,000-word article in Foreign Policy.

A serious challenge to the mainstream press is increasingly coming from new entrants who understand the mechanisms used for conveying mass market trivia and are adapting them to more serious issues. PolicyMic.com – a New York start-up run by Chris Altchek and Jake Horowitz – Vice and Buzzfeed are bringing a far younger audience to Venezuelan politics, Ukrainian riots and inequality.

Upworthy, the rather tiresome site which enjoys rampant traffic on Facebook on account of its carefully calibrated human interest headlines, received a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to run a global health and poverty section. In the UK, the viral experimentation by Trinity Mirror with Ampp3d and UsVsTh3m is in a similar vein of using games, graphics and interactivity to encourage engagement.

Altchek of PolicyMic makes the point that everything is changing in how younger audiences consume and process information. In an email exchange he told me: "Our metrics show that PolicyMic's readership is interested in understanding what's happening in the world and how it affects them. But they consume content much differently than older generations. We've found that charts, photos and maps are an effective way to frame certain stories and engage readers with complex or distant news.

"Our editors are held to high standards when it comes to balancing multimedia with important factual context. We also use data and metrics to inform our distribution strategies and engage as many people as possible with these important stories. There are dozens of examples amongst our best performing stories. Most recently, this story on Russia was shared 87,000 times and was read over 1m times."

The digital news industry struggles with creating metrics that mean something, or that demonstrate understanding and activity as the result of reading. Attention and engagement are slippery concepts, and impact even more so. How do we know whether the stream of images consumed around geopolitical violence will result in raised awareness, greater democratic engagement, or a desensitisation? Well, we don't. We can however safely assume that even if you agree with the maxim "a little learning is a dangerous thing", it must be balanced by the idea that we all must start somewhere. Beyond that, more research is needed.

http://www.theguardian.com/media/media-blog/2014/feb/23/graphic-images-horses-miley-cyrus