A caption must have a who, what, where, when, why and preferably- a how. Typically, it's a one to two sentence long text that describes a published photo. The Storify lesson on writing captions (https://storify.com/toledophotog/captions-the-text-that-explains-the-photos) taught me that a poorly executed caption can ruin the message of a photo, or even the "story package."
A helpful tip that I learned is to "avoid making judgements." If I took a picture of a protest and used a subject that was frowning in the picture, it would still be inappropriate to say, "An unhappy protester watches as..." There are other reasons that someone could be frowning, such as being in pain. They could have had an interaction with something or someone other than the protest, which is actually what caused them to frown. It's to easy to skew a motive based on your opinion, which can take credibility away from the story at hand. By sticking with the facts and taking an emotional perspective out of the caption, you'll open up the doors to allowing others to interpret what they're seeing/reading in order for them to be able to comfortably form their personal opinions.
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