Why let us wade through a story to find a caption?

As Kenya’s news publications have traditionally portrayed it, a caption is a brief verbal accompaniment of a photograph to explain it.

To “caption” is to capture the essence of a thing verbally. A caption is thus composed of a few words commenting on or explaining the content(s) of a graphic illustration.

Note there the word “accompaniment”. For, as many media consumers know, a good picture may tell the story much more directly, much more accurately and much more emotively than the whole Niagara of verbiage around it which our news desks claim to be coherent objective narratives.

Press consumers include some of the world’s busiest individuals. That is why the sub-editor must strive to deliver to them nothing that will raise any questions in one’s head and thus waste one’s time as one tries to figure it out.

A picture without an immediate verbal accompaniment is such a culprit.

Without at least a name juxtaposed to it, a picture is most likely to mystify, frustrate and even annoy a reader. I use the adjectives “immediate” and “juxtaposed” because they summarise what I am saying.

Take the mug shots on pages 23, 30 and 31 of last week’s Standard On Sunday.

The reader had to wade through each (extremely verbose) story itself because it was inside it that the sub-editor had deployed the word “pictured” to direct the reader to the photo a distance away from the verbal context.

JUXTAPOSED

Thus a picture and what was claimed to be its caption lay very long miles from each other, causing the sensitive reader a great deal of time and effort trying to link them mentally.

For the two elements to make a maximum impact on the consumer, the picture and its caption must be juxtaposed. To juxtapose — a verb formed from the Latin adjective juxta (“bordering”, “next to”) and the Latin noun position — is to place two or more objects (either real or ideal) immediately next to each other.

To intrude especially a mug shot into the text without, immediately next to it, printing at least several words to explain what the mug shot is or what it portends, is to mystify, frustrate and even anger all the multitude of consumers who prefer to be informed of what the picture is all about before going on to read the long story.

For, indeed, a good and racy caption beneath a picture is what may often excite the consumer into going on to read the longer story. I italicise the preposition “beneath” because, ideally, that is where a caption should lie — immediately below the picture.

That is also why the picture should be “highlighted”, namely, placed quite high up in relation to the story.

It is why the whole narrative — if it is the only picture-story on the page — should be placed quite high up on that page. In what newspaper page designers call “layout”, those elements are what we mean whenever we call upon the sub-editor “to highlight” a picture or a story.

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