What’s the Use of GIFs in Journalism?

I got lost along the way and came a little late to the post-lunch session at the AoIR 2024 conference, which is on crisis communication and has started with Sara Kopelman. Her interest is in the use of photojournalistic GIFs in Israeli news coverage.

She studied some 541 GIFs from such sites, and found a spread between neutral news, leisure news, and – somewhat surprisingly, given the usual uses of GIFs – negative news. Journalists find such GIFs useful for telling a story; it does so visually without needing a caption. Their endless repetition also poses some ethical questions, however: looped at infinitum, such GIFs repeat the same moment over and over again, potentially resulting in the pornographisation of tragedy.

This does reflect a common practice in television news, however, where such repetition – though not produced through GIFs – is common especially in the context of breaking news events, and can produce a disaster marathon. GIFs, then, are eye-catching click bait, provide concise visual storytelling and intensify stories, and offer a temporal experience of presence.