Picturing a quality local news visual: Perspectives from non-specialist journalists

Award-winning photojournalism content and discourse

One of the chief signals on what the industry regards as “quality” comes from photojournalism competitions, such as World Press Photo. These competitions, often judged by photo editors and photojournalists, are viewed as benchmarks of what professional journalists think is the best work in the field and, by rewarding this, set a benchmark on what their colleagues should strive for (Jenkins and Volz, 2018).

Evaluating the scholarship on discourse surrounding photojournalism competition judging and analyses of award-winning photojournalistic work provide a rich overview of what arguably visual literate professionals think is high-quality photojournalism. Early work in this vein (Kim and Smith, 2005; Greenwood and Smith, 2007) found that, over decades of photojournalism competitions, the work judges assessed as the best was negative in valence, drawing on news values like conflict (Caple, 2018), and was non-representative and focused on a narrow range of themes, such as war, poverty, and other social problems, and places. Other research conducted in this same period identified aspects of the image, such as novelty (Mendelson, 1999), and attributes of the photographer, such as courage (Kim and Smith, 2005), as being influential for award-winning work while photography historians like Gefter (2006) suggest that “in photojournalism, the subject is considered more important than the aesthetics of the image” (p. 26).

More recent scholarship (e.g., Carmona et al., 2018) has focused on award-winning sports photojournalism and found that a strong focus on the human element (by drawing on the “personalisation” news value [Caple, 2018]), highlighting impact ³ , and demonstrating technical prowess are central to this genre of photojournalism. A large study (Godulla, et al., 2021) that analysed 60 years of World Press Photo award-winning images found that the negativity in photographs that earlier research identified also persisted into the present. It also identified that conflict, along with “society” images, were the top two most-popular image categories over this period.

Scholars have critiqued award-winning photojournalism for being problem-focused and negative (Lough and McIntyre, 2019; Midberry and Dahmen, 2020; Midberry et al., 2020). These scholars call, instead, for photojournalism that adopts a solutions-oriented frame and presents opportunities alongside problems. At the same time, other scholars who have analysed award-winning photojournalistic work (Greenwood and Smith, 2007) note the logistical difficulties inherent in attempting less episodic work and argue that such work requires significant resources and institutional investment that might not be there. As such, attention to market dynamics and organisational realities is necessary when evaluating news images and the types of narratives they can portray.

Discourse-focused studies of judging commentary during photojournalism competitions (e.g., Lough, 2019) found that capturing (storytelling) “moments” and making emotionally resonant images were aspects the judges said they most highly valued in the assessed images. News values, technical proficiency, and aesthetic considerations, were all secondary. Regarding aesthetic considerations, the study found that cropping and depth/layering were the two most frequently discussed components. In contrast, principles like rule of thirds or the camera angle were “absent or rarely heard in the discussion” (p. 315).

Bringing together scholarship on these disparate press photo competitions and judges’ comments from multiple time periods allows for an understanding of how persistent or variable the characteristics of award-winning news images, and the attributes of those who make them, are. Specifically, the negativity and problem-oriented focus of much award-winning photojournalism is quite consistent over the years, especially for more distant or marginalised subject matter, as is the focus on the human element and on “storytelling” images. Less clear is the degree to which aspects like novelty, courage, and aesthetics are as consistently regarded over time.

Local and regional news

As this article’s opening anecdote foreshadowed, local and regional journalists are “very busy multitaskers who work across a range of platforms, roles, and stories” (Fisher, et al., 2020, p. 6). For example, from a survey of 307 regional Australian journalists, the vast majority identified with the omnibus “reporter” role while fewer than 2% identified as occupying a visual-specific role (Fisher, et al., 2020). Despite this, the journalists surveyed nominated social media and the need for more visual content as the two biggest changes in journalism over the past 5 years. This reinforces the notion that journalists who mainly write are also increasingly being expected to produce visuals and underscores the importance of understanding how they understand this more specialised role and perceive “quality” news visuals given the increased importance they play in everyday news production and presentation.

As noted earlier, paying attention to market forces and organisational realities is necessary when discussing what counts as “quality” news and whether journalists have the training, time, and resources to deliver this. As such, the following section overviews some of these dynamics within the local and regional news environment in Australia, where the present study was conducted, to provide context and nuance on these aspects.

Regional journalists in Australia perceive that insufficient time is the greatest obstacle to doing their jobs effectively, followed by a lack of resources and difficulties imposed by geographical distance (Fisher, et al., 2020). All these aspects affect the type of visual news that is published and how it is sourced. As a uniquely embodied form of journalism (Bock, et al., 2018), visual journalists can’t “call it in” unlike other reporters who can use myriad mediated technologies to obtain quotes and source materials. Having to physically be present to report the news for one’s local community means deciding whether the cost (in terms of all-important time but also in terms of fuel and vehicle wear-and-tear) is worth it to be on-site visually documenting an event. If not, reporters might choose to forego visuals entirely, use generic (stock or file) assets, ask an attendee to send through photos on their behalf, or try to source some visuals from relevant social media (Allan, 2017).

Understanding how non-specialist journalists in regional communities conceptualise “quality” local news visuals—in terms of technical aspects, aesthetic considerations, storytelling potential, or other attributes—can inform which stories they can cover themselves and which they have to ignore or have to outsource. This can also inform areas for future staff training and development or for organisational resourcing decisions. Given the overall lack of attention in the literature to non-specialist journalists’ perceptions of visual news quality, this study proposes the following research question:

RQ: how do non-specialist journalists working in regional parts of Australia conceptualise a quality local news photograph? What are the implications of this for scholarship and journalistic practice?

The section that follows outlines the methods used to approach this question and how the resulting data were analysed and theorised.

Data sites and sampling

This project adopted an interview-based approach to assess how regional journalists living in Australia conceptualised a quality news photograph. On-site interviews began in Tasmania in September 2022 and continued in Queensland and Western Australia through the end of the year. These states (Queensland and Western Australia) were selected because they have been the most affected by recent disruptions, newsroom downsizes, and journalistic reductions in service following the COVID-19 pandemic (Dickson, 2021). Meanwhile, as the only non-contiguous state or territory in Australia, Tasmania was chosen due to its unique attributes, including being Australia’s least-populous and most decentralised state. In all, 16 interviews were conducted (15 face-to-face ones and one interview over the phone).

A purposive sampling approach was used to identify and recruit participants. Specifically, the study sought journalists who were non-specialists (not photojournalists or other “visually literate” roles) and were working outside metropolitan areas in regional communities in Australia. With the exception of two regional centres (with an average population of about 100,000), the average number of people living in the communities the journalists interviewed for this study were working in was around 10,000. Participants were recruited from the researcher’s network and from referrals by other participants (as a form of chain-referral or “snowball” sampling). The following section describes the attributes of the participants and the news organisations they worked for.

Participant and news outlet characteristics

Participants were younger (the average age was 33.18 and the range was from 22 to 62 years) and possessed an average of 8.86 years’ of journalism experience (the range was from under 1 year to 37 years). The participant pool included nine men and seven women. Three-quarters of the sample had a journalism degree. The remaining quarter had no formal journalism training in university but one had an apprenticeship and one had a cadetship. Participants worked for two daily newspapers (both were in the regional centres), eight weekly newspapers, two fortnightly publications, and three online-only news outlets. Four of these were owned by large media conglomerates, six were owned by medium-sized conglomerates, four were independently owned, one was a regional hub of the publicly owned national broadcaster, and one was owned by a small, family-owned conglomerate. Thus, the participant pool represented a range of ownership and business models.

Data collection and analysis approach

Considering again the time-poor nature of regional journalists (Fisher, et al., 2020), on-site visits were prioritised whenever possible to demonstrate an investment in learning from specific individuals and valuing their unique knowledge and insights, to obtain richer data (through observations as well as interviews), and to allow the interviews to be conducted at the time and in the manner that best-suited the participants (for example, some interviews were conducted in the car while the journalists drove from their base to a story they were covering).

Automated transcripts were generated and then manually corrected before coding. The coding and analysis process started with several rounds of full-transcript reviews to allow the researchers to “soak” in the data and become familiar with the range of participant responses. After this, various concepts from the literature (e.g., specific aesthetics principles; news values; and emotive and technical qualities) were identified and relevant aspects in the transcripts were coded as such. Concepts that weren’t represented in the literature were also developed and included in the model that is presented in the findings section.

Industry perspectives on a quality local news visual

Interactions among the dimensions of a quality local news visual

Before progressing further, it is necessary to discuss the extent to which these dimensions may or may not work together within a non-specialist and local journalism context. Paying attention to which of these dimensions are in potential tension and how these tensions operate is necessary to provide nuance to this discussion and to potentially inform photojournalistic practice within the local news context. As but one example, participants said they valued photos with local faces and generally regarded more photos as better. However, ironically, while including more photos does potentially increase the number of local faces that can be featured, it also decreases the sizes of these, which can negatively impact on the audience’s reception. In one participant’s words, “If you make it [the photo] too small, it’s wasted and might as well not be there.” Similarly, while the journalists interviewed seem to want to avoid visual cliches with the images they published, this value isn’t necessarily shared with news audiences who are helping shape local visual news by the photos they directly contribute or that journalists find online and embed into their stories. This ambition is also potentially challenged by conventions found in other types of photographic contexts, including posing for the camera and smiling, that can inform community members’ “photographic behavior” and how this is performed for the (news) camera (Desfor, 1980).

Potentially in tension, too, are the aspirations to, on one hand, capture images that evidence attention to aesthetics and, on the other hand, to capture images that are candid, evidence good timing, and are in focus and not blurry. Participants placed more weight on getting technically proficient photos—ones that are in focus, not blurry, and of sufficient resolution—over aesthetic considerations. Likewise, the desire to achieve consonance and have the mood or tenor of the image match the tone of the accompanying story is in tension with the desire for candid photos and the need to sometimes “boss your talent around” to get them to look the right way and to “tell them how they need to look.”

Despite the heavy emphasis participants implicitly placed on news values in their definitions of a quality news visual, whether the visuals reflect any news values at all and, if so, which ones they do, is outside the direct control of journalists for the potentially high proportion of community contributed or crowdsourced images that find their ways into local news. The relevant news values, such as proximity and consonance, that local journalists prized in local visual news stand in stark contrast to others, such as conflict and negativity, that tend to dominate elite photojournalism competitions.

Lastly, the desire to capture images with “storytelling quality” that show rather than tell is potentially in tension with the realities of local news environments where human resources are often stretched thin and where the tyranny of distance and lack of time often mean that more literal and less evocative images, such as discussions at a city council meeting, are made and published rather than more storytelling images, such as taking the time to go out and photograph who or what is being affected by what the city council is discussing.

Hierarchically situating the dimensions of a quality local news visual

Although participants mentioned some dimensions, such as the narrative one, more often than others, such as ones related to aesthetics, not each of these dimensions is equally feasible given the unique attributes of the local news environment. For this reason, the following section situates the dimensions of a quality local news visual into a hierarchy from the most routine and feasible to the most aspirational. These dimensions and their place in the hierarchy are products of the local news environment and might be different in a different environment or if professional photojournalists were instead interviewed.

Production and presentation circumstances, which we operationalise as camera-independent factors (such as whether the action recorded is candid, the size of the visual, and other viewing conditions, etc.), are the foundational layer of this hierarchy as they affect all the other dimensions. Having an explicit dimension dedicated to this aspect is important as it raises the visibility of the factors in front of and behind the lens—such as awareness of being observed and how that can affect behaviour or whether the action is posed or candid—that can markedly affect who or what is shown and in which ways as well as how the audience reacts to the resulting depictions (Thomson, 2019).

The second dimension—technical—is operationalised as camera-dependent factors (such as the image’s resolution, its focus, how camera settings have influenced how motion is rendered, and its exposure) that influence the perception of a single image. These are often basic attributes that affect whether the image can be seen and appreciated. For example, too bright or dark an image can render its details illegible; too much motion blur can render the details unintelligible; and an out-of-focus or pixelated image can also potentially diminish the reality that the viewer experienced and that the image tries to reproduce. At the same time, technical skills can also be used strategically (or can be neglected) with various consequences. As an example of the former, a person experiencing domestic violence might be backlit and thus underexposed as a means of protecting their privacy while still visualising their story. As an example of the latter, audiences sometimes perceive the blurry and grainy visuals of so-called citizen photojournalists as more authentic than the work of professionals (Allan, 2017). Participants in this sample said they largely lacked training in making photographs and videos and, instead, made liberal use of the “auto” mode on their standalone or smartphone cameras.

The third dimension—representational—focuses on who or what is shown in a straightforward way. It is analogous to the denotative function of images (their literal expressions) as contrasted with their connotative functions (what they mean) (Aiello, 2006). As an example, audiences around the world can recognise a photograph of a woman as depicting a person; however, the attributes and qualities of femininity and what it means to be a woman are much more culturally specific (and contested). Participants in the sample said they are often unable to go out just to make photos or videos but can make some if they’re already there to do an interview. These realities affect who or what is represented in local visual news.

The fourth dimension—aesthetics—focuses on the way the image is composed. It is concerned with the relationship between positive and negative space, colour, angles, depth and layering, and the positioning of elements within the frame. Again, considering the lack of participants’ formal training in visual news and the altered sense of aesthethics that smartphone camera hardware and software encourages for the many journalists who use an iPhone or equivalent to take photos or make videos (Thomson and Uddin, 2023), the participants’ sense of aesthetics likely contrasts markedly with those of specialists.

The fifth dimension—psycho-physiological—concerns how the viewer reacts to what is shown. The physiological aspects of perception are influenced by technical considerations (such as contrast, exposure, blur, and resolution) while the psychological aspects can be affected by the preceding dimensions (such as the beauty of an artfully captured geometric composition or the emotion felt by seeing a familiar or unfamiliar “other” or circumstance). Here, personal experience and subjectivity play a role in what is emotive and resonant. A photograph of a family member might provoke a different reaction for someone else in the same family than it might for a stranger. This can, of course, be affected by the use of allusions to art and history (such as the pietà) that might provoke an emotion due to the more universal resonance of a particular subject or interaction even if the viewer is a stranger to who or what is depicted.

The sixth dimension—news values—refers to the constructed categories, such as personalisation, proximity, impact, conflict, prominence, etc., that journalists and scholars have identified in some contexts as being influential criteria for what can be considered as newsworthy (see Caple, 2018, for an overview). These are more latent and implicit characteristics that require familiarity to understand, apply, and identify. For example, to appreciate whether a represented person is prominent or proximate will depend on who is seeing the image and their familiarity with the specific person or type of person being shown.

The seventh and final dimension—narrative–concerns the storytelling quality of the image; whether it merely shows something literally or tells a bigger story about the content represented or about an aspect of the human condition. Due to the resource-intensive nature of showing rather than telling, from the raw time required to travel to a relevant location as well as the time necessary to earn trust with sources (Thomson, 2018b), this layer is at the top of the hierarchy and is aspirational in nature. The narrative layer applies to content within the frame as well as extends beyond it. For example, it concerns whether the image is consonant with or dissonant to an accompanying headline and also how other aspects of news design, such as layout and accompanying colour treatments, can affect how the image is “read” and understood.