visual journalism and verification at war: norwegian and swedish news outlets covering ukraine

Considering the visual coverage of the war in Ukraine, this book provides critical insights into how newsrooms make use of visual materials, how visuals partake in journalistic storytelling in a modern wartime context, and how visual journalism practices affect the news media’s role as arbiter of accuracy and ethics.

Based on a mixed-methods study, including analyses of selected visually driven news stories and interviews with media professionals in Norwegian and Swedish national media outlets houses, this book examines the news media’s approach to the visual coverage of the war in Ukraine following Russian invasion in 2022. The work is theoretically underpinned by ongoing boundary work within journalism, and editorial negotiations over issues such as verification, source criticism, and trust; witnessing and ways of seeing; and ethical gatekeeping in photojournalism. At a juncture of rising concerns over AI, public distrust, and propaganda, this study adds a real-time aspect to these debates and reveals challenges as well as emerging strategies in the unfolding coverage. Furthermore, the comparative Scandinavian context serves to highlight points of tension between the global and the local; between those newsrooms relying on global image brokers and those conducting their own in-house reporting.

Written for researchers and advanced students of Visual Journalism and Conflict Reporting, this book is a timely intervention.

Maria Nilsson is Associate Professor of Journalism in the Department of Media Studies at Stockholm University, Sweden. Her research interests include visual storytelling, newsroom routines, the ethics of witnessing, visual representations of crises, and the history of photography. Her current research focuses on visual verification practices and disinformation and the truth claims of journalism in crisis coverage.

Anne Hege Simonsen is associate professor and head of department at Department for journalism and media studies, Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway. Her research interests include visual journalism, global and international reporting, climate crisis and environment coverage, media and minorities, physical walls and boundaries and non-fiction writing. She has written, edited and contributed to several text books in journalism for the Norwegian market.