Andrew Mendelson

CUNY Graduate School of Journalism · Department of Journalism

The paparazzi, those mostly freelance photographers who relentlessly pursue celebrities for their images, are criticized for both the way they go about their work and for the content of their photographs. The standard way of understanding them is through a legal and ethical lens, focusing on issues of privacy. This entry provides an overview of how...

This paper presents a case study of the possibilities of slow photojournalism. Over the past decade, award-winning photojournalist David Burnett has used a 60-year-old Speed Graphic film camera to document US political events, several Olympic Games, and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, among other projects. His photographs reveal a significantly...

This article presents a case study of journalistic authority and collective identity in the context of the changes in mass communications prompted by web interactivity. It traces National Geographic's coverage of Puerto Rico and examines comments posted on an online forum in response to the magazine's first article on Puerto Rico that was widely av...

Digitization has resulted in great uncertainty for journalism, leading to disruption of business models, revenue streams, media distinctions, and production practices. This uncertainty has led to many articles, reports, blog posts, and general commentary discussing the future of both journalism and the skills required by journalists to succeed in t...

This article presents a hybrid methodological technique that fuses elements of experimental design with qualitative strategies to explore mediated communication. Called the “qualitative experiment,” this strategy uses focus groups and in-depth interviews within randomized stimulus conditions typically associated with experimental research. This mix...

This article considers how World War I was explained and memorialized in American stereography after its conclusion. Stereographs were side-by-side photographs of the same scene, which when seen through a set of lenses called a stereoscope, created a three-dimension viewing effect. The Keystone stereograph set of 300 cards, which was used in this s...

This article examines Time magazine’s visual discourse in its coverage of Iraq War insurgent Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s death. Time marked the event by using the same visual trope — a head crossed out by a red ‘X’ — used to mark the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 and Adolf Hitler in 1945. The study provides a semiotic analysis of the cover, traces the...

Using a National Geographic magazine story on Saudi Arabia as a case study, this article examines how pictures and text in a photo story interact to produce meaning for readers. Specifically, it investigates how participants’ perceptions of Saudi Arabia differed when they were exposed only to the text of the article, only to its photographs, or to...

More than any other publication, National Geographic magazine has taught Americans about the world around them. Recently, the magazine's view of the world has become more complex. Since 1995, the magazine has been producing editions published in languages other than English. This raises questions as to how international audiences negotiate these “g...

This study links uses and gratifications theory to a theory that addresses civic engagement and then applies it to create an electronic public sphere designed to encourage citizens to participate in civic life. An experimental website on the topic of the state budget was created and tested to assure maximum usability by citizens. It found that the...

This experiment investigates cognitive and emotional effects related to changing the label ascribed to still photographs from fictional to real, while keeping the content constant. Viewers tended to react emotionally more strongly to photographs labeled as real, but they thought more about photographs labeled as fiction. Further, the label assigned...

One group of media practitioners is consistently viewed more negatively than others - the paparazzi. When the topic of the paparazzi arises, it is usually in reference to their relationship with celebrities and privacy. Rather than examining the celebrity-paparazzi issue through the lens of privacy, the purpose of this article is to reframe the iss...

A survey administered to reality TV viewers revealed that the most salient motives for watching reality TV were habitual pass time and reality entertainment. Additional analysis indicated that those who enjoyed reality TV the most for its entertainment and relaxing value also tended to perceive the meticulously edited and frequently preplanned cont...

An effective website is usable and engaging. In this article we investigate how navigation bar images and text may increase perceptions of website ease of use and interactivity. In an experiment we found that clickable images that accurately communicated the content they were linked to contributed to higher perceived levels of telepresence and stro...

The establishment of a Jewish homeland is central to many aspects of Judaism, and from any standard of newsworthiness, the events in Palestine in the late 1940s and early 1950s were a major development. Still, journalistic texts are not created in a vacuum. To fully understand the meaning of these texts, the cultural context in which they are creat...

As online journalism takes on a larger role in informing the electorate about issues of importance, an understanding of how citizens interact with online journalistic content may be as important as what the content is. If a citizen is not able to find or use the information necessary to make decisions about community issues, the information is wort...

This article addresses the question how people process news photographs and news stories as function of their scores on 2 scales designed to measure 2 "cognitive styles" called visualizing and verbalizing. Although newspaper practitioners believe news photos enhance the newspaper reading process, research has not demonstrated a clearly positive imp...

A study was conducted to examine the relationship of visualizing and verbalizing cognitive styles and the processing of news photographs. Theory predicts that attention will mediate the relationship between visualizing and photo memory, but not between verbalizing and memory. Both visualizing and attention predicted memory, but the mediational rela...

Call-in programs have been specifically designed to give citizens a venue for offering their perceptions on various topics. The purposes of this exploratory study were to examine the extent to which callers brought in new political ideas and incorporated values, solutions, and consequences in their comments and to analyze the reactions of hosts/gue...

Critics of news photography have argued that most news photographs are highly conventional. Two experiments were conducted to examine how people respond to photographs that break with conventionality. Specifically, these studies tested the effects of photographic novelty in terms of preferences for viewing, viewing time, recall memory, and interest...