Visual Communication Research On News Media Reports Of Media Events In The Internet Era

The visual turning of mass media had made us living in a world surrounded by images. The visual presentation of mass medias, as an important carrier of visual communication, had also changed tremendously due to the development of media technology. However, traditional news industry had been declining day by day under the impact of new media in such a visual supremacy age. It’s vital for newspapers to carry on the reform and innovation of visual communication in the new media environment. This paper took the New York Times website as the research object and discussed on the development trend and characteristics of visual communication in the New York times under the new media environment by analyzing its visual communication of different types of media events in different periods.In this research, we found that the way of audience to look news has changed tremendously along with the development of media technology and increasing demand for visual information. The medias have been changing their visual communication measures. According to the comparative analysis of news reports on New York Times website, the number of pictures has increased, the application of new media technology has been more and more diversified. The innovation of data news and exploration of news visualization made New York Times a good representative of traditional media digital transformation, especially in the era of the whole media. Overall, the visual communication of news report on media event of New York Times has a series of features such as multimedia and nonlinear in the way of content presentation, digitalization and visualization of information processing, the fuzziness and interaction of the information transmission subjects, etc.However, technology is a double-edged sword. On one hand the development of new media technology has made the visual communication of news reports more and more diversified, on the other hand is brings some new problems worthy of reflection. This research discussed three issues of the visual communication of media events on New York Times website, from the perspective of the theory of media technology. First, the excessive pursuit of visual way of reporting replaced the pursuit of content of news. Second, the lower cost of image forgery and tampering in the digital age reduced the credit of the news media. Third, the pursuit of news authenticity and respect for readers’ right to know relaxed the visual communication scale of news report, and it might easily lead to ethical crisis.