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

媒体对于公众参与气候变化至关重要，通过框架概念，这一领域越来越受到学术界的关注。然而，这项工作有两个关键的局限性：第一，尽管新闻来源越来越多样化，特别是“数字化”的新媒体机构，但大多数学术文献都集中在传统媒体上。这些都看到了快速的观众增长。除了作为气候新闻创新的网站，他们还雇佣了更多的环境记者（与新闻业裁员的趋势背道而驰）。因此，数字化环境新闻机构是了解如何更有效地让人们参与气候变化的重要合作者。其次，学术文献的范围有限。如果将传播周期想象为一个持续的循环（Hall 1973），则有三个兴趣点：生产（新闻如何创建），内容（新闻“人工制品”）和消费（与内容的互动）。这些文献主要是内容研究（Nisbet，2009），有些侧重于观众的反应（奥尼尔和史密斯，2014）。新闻制作方面的工作极为有限。这是有问题的，因为内容和受众研究都没有解决某些框架如何以及为什么存在，而不是其他框架。气候参与影响的潜力巨大，因为气候新闻的某些框架（例如作为健康问题）比其他问题更具吸引力（例如，作为一个有争议的科学问题;奥尼尔等人，2015年）：然而目前，不那么吸引人的框架主导着气候新闻，（奥尼尔2013）。这个博士项目将解决这两个重大的研究差距，共同生产的研究与领先的数字出生的气候新闻机构，使用框架理论，对气候新闻制作中的“框架构建”进行实证研究。该项目提出了跨学科的研究，借鉴地理学，环境社会科学，心理学，政治学，媒体和新闻学研究。

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.