Everyday Visual News by Tj Thomson

Everyday Visual News by Tj Thomson

With an international overview of how local visual news is made, sourced, edited, and published across geographical areas, this book explores how audiences respond to the visual news that is locally available.

In order to listen to audiences, the book uses a rich mix of methods including photo-ranking exercises, digital diary studies, photo voice studies, and interviews with journalists and more than 100 community members. The book adopts the focus on visual news as audience behaviours and expectations are shifting as journalists struggle to maintain trust and loyalty. Additionally, it responds to the importance of visuals in attracting attention, helping people navigate information landscapes, and providing more emotional connections with the people and places represented in journalistic storytelling. By paying attention to audience feedback and seeing communities through their eyes, this book offers a path for bringing journalists and audiences closer together and to improving journalistic quality as a result.

Everyday Visual News serves as a valuable reference and starting point for advanced students and researchers of local and visual journalism and news audiences.

T.J. Thomson is an Associate Professor of Visual Communication at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. He is the co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Visual Journalism (2025).

Rachael Anderson is a researcher in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. She holds a PhD from Monash University in Journalism and Media Studies. Her research interests include visual journalism, news coverage of terrorism, and how cultural belonging and otherness are mediated through news discourse.