The Insistent Image: The Photojournalistic GIF as a Storytelling Form in Online News

Despite cultural associations with lighthearted social media interactions and humor, the GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) now appears in serious contexts as a legitimate form of online news, serving as a tool for documenting disasters, violence, and tragedies. The GIF’s repetitive, silent nature diverges from traditional visual news formats, offering narrative potentials different from the “decisive moment” of still photographs or the linear duration of videos. This article investigates the GIF’s unique storytelling format in tragic news coverage, leveraging insights from photojournalism and visual storytelling literature. Through visual analysis and in-depth interviews with Israeli news editors, this article explores the GIF’s centrality in Israeli news organizations’ adaptation to social media and the attention economy. Furthermore, the Israeli digital media ecosystem—characterized as a news-saturated environment of continuous negative news and high online news consumption—reveals the GIF as an emerging storytelling format with distinctive narrative strengths and constraints. Taken together, this context illuminates the ways in which GIFs’ production surfaces critical ethical considerations in contemporary visual journalism.