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The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
The content analysis of news journal covers, which will be addressed in this paper, is
an interdisciplinary field in which key research issues relating to artistic, journalistic,
linguistic and communication science are engaged. The problem incurred in the
process of making scientific research in this field is that different research issues are
often linked and therefore cannot be treated in isolation, but are rather tied to
discipline-specific methods and discourses that focus primarily on the production of
text and text meaning.
In the following discussion of this topic, I will endeavour to assemble the findings and
methods of the above disciplines and approaches and apply these to aspects of the
production and control of visual attention used in news journal covers from 1945 to
the present. Three methods will form the main axes of the proposed analysis: a
method structured around social science content analysis, an art historical
iconographic and iconologic method and a self-developed method of visual analysis.
2. Sociological Content Analysis and Art Historical Iconography
In the field of social science in German-speaking countries the most elaborate and
frequently cited theory and methodology of content analysis can be found in the work
of Klaus Merten 1 and Philipp Mayring 2 . Both authors describe a broad spectrum of
content analysis methods focussing primarily on text-oriented objects of study.
Merten and Mayring deal briefly with the possibility of using content analysis to
explore image material, but do not pursue the topic further. In order to be able to
perform content analysis of news journal covers with respect to the visual forms and
especially the typography, I would therefore suggest the application of content
analysis in combination with an iconographic method, in order to develop an image
description.
The tools from art historical analysis best suited to this type of research can be traced
back to Erwin Panofsky’s method of iconography and iconology 3 , through which
Panofsky dissolves boundaries with other disciplines, so that Art History is treated as
one among many related Humanities disciplines that all appeal to iconologic
interpretation for analysis. This method consists of three consecutive steps:
1) The pre-iconographic description – this description should account for visible
objects, people or phenomena that are present in the image, and all specialist
knowledge associated with the objects in the image possessed by the coder
should be excluded.
2) Iconographical analysis – this description relies on the coder’s knowledge of
the depicted themes and concepts, and how these are linked to artistic motifs
and the picture’s composition.
1 Merten, Klaus (1995): Inhaltsanalyse: Einführung in Theorie, Methode und Praxis. Opladen
2 Mayring, Philipp (1983): Qualitative Inhaltsanalyse: Grundlagen und Techniken. Weinheim
3 Panofsky, Erwin (1955): Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History. New York
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