What advantages do images have over printed text in journalistic reporting?

When news organizations take full advantage of two other important characteristics of storytelling on the Web — context and continuity — multimedia stories are wrapped in a story “shell” that provides background information on the story. This could include everything from databases, timelines and infoboxes to lists of related stories, links to other resources and online forums. The information in each shell gives the reader a sense of the context of a story and where it fits in with other stories on the same topic. Each story shell, in turn, is part of a broader issue or beat shell at a news site that defines the more general context for each story