Local Visual News Presentation and Sourcing Practices: Insights and Implications

Journalists and editors have myriad options to create or source photographs and videos for local news. These include drawing on generic stock photos, syndicated news wire content, and visual content made in-house or sourced from the public, including community organisations, businesses and government entities. Who makes the news visuals local audiences consume matters, as does the degree to which journalists and editors are transparent about this labour and the potentially differing motivations of various stakeholders who might actively or passively contribute their content for journalists to republish. This paper systematically demonstrates how four print and digital news outlets in regional or rural parts of Australia approach the presentation and sourcing of visual news (photographs and non-television video) in their print products, outlet websites, and (if applicable) on social media. The study finds that the news outlets in this study placed much greater emphasis on photographic visuals than video visuals, that the outlets didn’t uniformly publish all their visual content across digital, print or social media platforms, and that the outlets frequently left visuals unsourced, especially on social media where 90 percent of visuals were unattributed, raising issues about information transparency.