"How am I supposed to do this?": Navigating the use of visuals in the production of digital climate change journalism

媒体对公众参与气候变化至关重要，这一领域通过框架概念受到越来越多的学术关注。然而，这项工作有两个关键的限制。首先，大多数学术文献关注的是传统媒体，尽管新闻来源越来越多样化，特别是“数字出生”的新媒体组织。这些游戏的用户正在快速增长。作为气候新闻创新的网站，它们正在雇佣更多的环境记者（与新闻业裁员的趋势相反）。因此，数字化的环境新闻机构是理解如何更有效地让人们参与气候变化的重要合作者。第二，学术文献的范围有限。如果把传播周期想象成一个持续的循环（Hall 1973），那么就有三个兴趣点：生产（新闻是如何被创造出来的）、内容（新闻的“人工制品”）和消费（与内容的接触）。文献以内容研究为主（Nisbet, 2009），部分关注于受众反应（O’neill and Smith, 2014）。新闻制作方面的工作极为有限。这是有问题的，因为无论是内容研究还是受众研究都没有解决某些框架存在的方式和原因，而不是其他框架。这里有巨大的气候参与影响潜力，因为气候新闻的某些框架（例如，作为健康问题）比其他框架（例如，作为有争议的科学问题；O'Neill等人，2015）更具吸引力：但目前，不太吸引人的框架主导了气候新闻（O'Neill 2013）。该博士项目将解决这两个重大的研究缺口，与领先的数字化气候新闻机构共同开展研究，利用框架理论，对气候新闻生产中的“框架构建”进行实证研究。该项目建议跨学科研究，包括地理、环境社会科学、心理学、政治学、媒体和新闻研究。

The media is critical for public engagement with climate change, and an area receiving increasing academic attention through the concept of framing. However, there are two key limitations to this work.First, the majority of scholarly literature focuses on traditional media, despite the increasing diversity of news sources, particularly 'digital-born' new media organisations. These are seeing rapid audience growth. As well as being sites of climate journalistic innovation, they are employing more environment journalists (bucking the trend for journalism redundancies). Digital-born environment news organisations are thus essential collaborators in understanding how to engage people more effectively with climate change. Second, academic literature is limited in scope. If the communication cycle is imagined as an ongoing loop (Hall 1973), there are three interest points: production (how news is created), content (the news 'artefact') and consumption (engagement with content). The literature is dominated by content studies (Nisbet, 2009), with some focus on audience response (O'Neill and Smith, 2014). Work on news production is extremely limited. This is problematic, as neither content nor audience studies address how and why certain frames exist, and not others. There is huge potential for climate engagement impact here, since certain framings of climate news (e.g. as a health issue) are much more engaging than others (e.g. as a disputed scientific issue; O'Neill et al. 2015): yet currently, less engaging frames dominate climate news (O'Neill 2013).This PhD project will address these two significant research gaps, co-producing research with leading digital-born climate news organisations, using frame theory, to empirically study "frame-building" in climate news production. The project proposes interdisciplinary research drawing on geography, environmental social science, psychology, politics, and media and journalism studies.