The aim of this thesis was to find out how journalists regard to a caption as a part of journalistic work process and how they create captions to their own stories.

When people are reading newspapers, they first check out the picture and then read the caption. When people are creating newspapers, they write everything else first and the caption at the very late point of the process. This thesis was made to detect whether this statement is true or not. It also aimed to find out who is responsible for creating captions and what kind of story there is behind the captions.

As study material there were two daily newspapers, Kaleva and Keskipohjanmaa. Both newspapers have same kind of a role in their own areas. First five print and web newspapers were analysed. Then the data from the journalist, photographers, sub editors and managing editors were collected by semi-structured interviews.

The results shows that the abovesaid hypothesis is correct: creating the caption is the writers’ job and plays a really small part in the work process. Photographers participate to this process very seldom. Sub editors edit captions regularly, but they do not have as much information as the writers and photographers. Captions made by sub editors are typically more universal.

According to the results there are two simple methods to increase the quality of captions. First, the journalists have to personally decide to use more time and effort in making captions. Secondly the journalist, photographers and sub editors could have a meeting where they process the caption together.