Tony Thomson
Biographic Data
| ID | 815252 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Tony Thomson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Tony |
| FAMILY NAME | Thomson |
| SIGNATURE | THOMSON T |
| AFFILIATIONS | RMIT University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3913-3030 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 40 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 97 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 40 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Unlearning journalism through decolonising, Indigenous approaches
Journalism has both contributed to shaping and been shaped by colonialism and has reproduced the status quo at the expense of those on the margins. Considering this reality, this study explores how journalism education and practice can be unlearned through a decolonising, Indigenous standpoint. It does this through an Indigenous co-led approach that brings together journalism students, journalism academics, and working journalists with family con…
Mis- and distrust cues: Investigating how people determine who and what to trust online
The sheer volume of news and information people see online, especially on social media, can be overwhelming and make it difficult – or impossible – for people to fact-check the content they come across on a daily basis. In light of this, our study explored the everyday methods people use to decide who and what to trust online. Using a 1-week digital diary study with 55 adult participants living in Australia, we learnt that mis- and distrust cues …
“We're very isolated professionally”: Learning and doing visual journalism in uncertain communities of practice
The news is highly visual yet this aspect of journalism, particularly in non-urban areas, is often neglected or attempted through a piecemeal approach that is based on intuition and trial-and-error rather than supported through formal training or professional development. Drawing on the community of practice literature, this interview- and observation-based study explores how visual journalism is made at six news outlets in non-urban areas and th…
Expecting Humans, Encountering Machines: An Expectancy Violations Theory Approach to Generative AI in Journalism
Drawing on Expectancy Violations Theory (EVT), we conducted 60 semi-structured interviews to examine (1) how news audiences in Australia and Germany form expectations about journalists’ use of generative AI (GenAI); (2) the antecedents shaping those expectations; and (3) how they evaluate perceived expectation violations. Participants envisioned journalism as a human-centered practice, rejecting autonomous GenAI use in core reporting functions. T…
Mistrust as a precondition for critical thinking and media literacy
Media literacy can help individuals identify misinformation, including content that is deliberately and falsely presented as news. A key yet underexplored component of media literacy is how mistrust acts as a precondition for a critical disposition towards information sources and the claims they make. This study introduces the concept of mistrust within the context of verifying information and explores its relationship to media literacy. We condu…
News audiences’ acceptance of generative artificial intelligence in journalism: A use case study across three domains
News audiences’ acceptance of generative AI (GenAI) in journalism is shaped by their knowledge of (or direct experience with) what AI is, what it can do, and what implications its use has. Acknowledging this, the present study draws on the technology acceptance model to first explore what a sample of news audiences in two countries knows about GenAI and what their experiences, if any, with it have been to date. Next, it explores this sample's acc…
Everyday encounters with misinformation online: Examining sources, topics and modes
Public Knowledge and Expertise Under Authoritarian Siege: A Defense of Academic Freedom from Digital Journalism Studies
This article addresses the growing global assault on academic freedom—a cornerstone of democratic societies now under increasing threat from authoritarian regimes. It highlights a global decline in that freedom since its peak 20 years ago, focusing on the United States in 2025 to illustrate rapidly escalating academic silencing, even in a country with well-established democratic freedoms and institutions. Drawing on the collective expertise of in…
Generative Visual AI in News Organizations: Challenges, Opportunities, Perceptions, and Policies
The use of AI-enabled text-to-image generators, such as Midjourney and DALL-E, raises profound questions about the purpose, meaning, and value of images generally, and the production, editing, and consumption of images in journalism specifically.This study explores how photo editors (or their equivalents) in seven countries perceive and/or use generative visual AI in their editorial operations and outlines the challenges and opportunities they se…
Digital Journalism (Studies): An Agenda for the Future
Digital Journalism has an important role to play in encouraging and publishing research with societal relevance that advances digital journalism studies as a field. In this article we discuss the multiple types of articles we publish: research articles, conceptual articles, review articles, advancing methods articles and commentaries. We also introduce you to several great examples of such articles, as well as introduce the growing number of arti…
Visual Veracity in an AI Age: One Simple Approach to Image Provenance
It’s all about relationships. This might seem anachronistic in an age of rapidly advancing artificial intelligence (AI), in which the hype seems to center on computers and what they’re capable of r
Audience Perceptions of Engaging News Photos: A Picture-Sorting and Interview Study
Scholars know most about engaging news visuals from the perspectives of visually literate specialists, such as photojournalists, photo editors, and related roles. Recent advances in research also complement these understandings with insights from non-specialist journalists who are increasingly being tasked with making news visuals in addition to their other writing and reporting tasks. However, we know comparatively little from audiences about th…
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…
Old Threats, New Name? Generative AI and Visual Journalism
Generative AI applications have been hailed as “transformative,” “disruptive,” and posing a “threat to human journalists and media professionals.” Much of this discourse reflects longstanding concerns about the impact of technological change on both the production and consumption ends of journalism. Perhaps nowhere is this felt more strongly than in visual journalism, where fears about AI replacing cameras and associated implications are rife. Th…
Analysing and Contextualising Regional, Rural, or Remote Visual News: A Two-Pronged Approach
Visuals are an important component of both the non-urban news landscape and of the wider digital media environment where audiences increasingly turn to for news. Visuals help focus audiences’ attention and motivate them to explore further or divert their attention elsewhere. They also spark emotional reactions more easily and are also more memorable than words. But some forms of visual news have received greater scholarly attention than others an…
News Audience Experiences with Local Visual News: A Digital Diary Study
Focusing attention on the visual mode in news is essential given the visual nature of online news environments, the necessity of engaging audiences inundated in a flood of content, and the way that visual news can spark a unique reaction with its viewers. Given this, the present study explores the topics represented in visual news—photographs, other types of images, or videos—that non-urban audiences regard as surprising, interesting, or remarkab…
Computer-mediated representations: A qualitative examination of algorithmic vision and visual style
To the general public, text-to-image generators, such as Midjourney and DALL-E, seem to work through magic and, indeed, their inner workings are often frustratingly opaque. This is, in part, due to the lack of transparency from big tech companies around aspects like training data and how the algorithms powering their generators work, on the one hand, and the deep and technical knowledge in computer science and machine learning, on the other, that…
Bodies in Journalism: The View from Behind and in Front of the Lens
Perhaps nowhere is the importance of the body more keenly felt than in visual journalism. With precious few exceptions, journalists who use cameras to produce journalism can’t “call it in” and must be physically on the scene to do their jobs. This comes with unique implications for how these journalists regulate their bodies and perform their roles. But, in the past two decades, the visual side of journalism has been gutted. Fewer staff photojour…
Contrasting Frames: Visual Coverage at Urban and Regional News Outlets in Australia and China
Visual news can be a broad topic and encapsulate a myriad of forms, conventions, and representational content. The present study delves deeply into the image-based side of news to explore how visual news is produced, framed, and presented at four print and digital news outlets in urban and regional parts of Australia and China. We first conducted a qualitative denotative, stylistic-semiotic, and ideological framing analysis of a total of 1,408 im…
Learning the art of scholarly peer-review: Insights from the communication discipline
Many scholars find the peer-review process to be a puzzling, non-transparent, and subjective exercise. Many emerging scholars also learn about the peer-review and publishing process through painful and time-consuming trial and error while still students or as early-career researchers rather than through formal training or guided supervision. Yet many pitfalls exist in this process for new and veteran scholars alike. With this study, grounded in t…
Picturing a quality local news visual: Perspectives from non-specialist journalists
This study explores a key question around local visual news: what do non-specialist journalists regard as a quality news visual? This study focuses on still images as the most ubiquitous building block in the local visual news landscape, whether as thumbnails that are shared with links on social media platforms, as hero images accompanying articles, as photo galleries, or as still frames extracted from videos. Much of what we know about a quality…
Visibility and invisibility in the aged care sector: Visual representation in Australian news from 2018-2021
The skyrocketing number and severity of issues in Australian aged care led to the establishment of the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety in 2018. Yet, compared to other Royal Commissions, media coverage has been relatively muted, and public awareness and engagement with aged care issues has been uneven. Journalists bear a significant responsibility for shaping the national conversation about aged care, and ensuring this demograph…
Who or What Gets Referenced by Whom, How Often, and in Which Ways? Exploring Journalists’ Sourcing Practices in the Context of Aged Care Coverage
Sources are an essential component to journalistic reporting and are a critical determinant of its quality. Who or what is referenced, in which ways, how often, and why matters and can reveal important insights into journalistic practice as well as the values and implicit assumptions of both the news outlets and broader societies under study. Acknowledging this, this study examines sourcing practices of journalists working at four national news o…
Designing the Visual Gateways into Crime News: A Comparison of Youtube Thumbnails from Journalists and Non-Journalists
Thumbnails and link previews play an outsized role in determining which online content is shared, seen, and engaged with. But conventions for these vary depending on the platform and the content creator. Journalists and non-journalists alike use and sometimes design these thumbnails with often striking differences. On some news aggregators, like Apple News or Google News, the bulk of the thumbnails are photographs related in some way to the linke…
What Does a Journalist Look like? Visualizing Journalistic Roles through AI
The question of “who is a journalist?” has animated much discussion in journalism scholarship. Such discussions generally stem from the intersecting technological, economic, and social transformations journalism has faced in the twenty-first century. An equally relevant aspect, albeit one that has hitherto been less studied, is what a journalist looks like. Some studies have tackled this through, for example, examining depictions of journalists i…
Mapping the emotional labor and work of visual journalism
The study of emotion in journalism has largely been ignored and, when studied, is relegated almost exclusively to media texts. As such, this research aims to rectify this imbalance by focusing on the human side of journalism practice and the emotional labor and work experienced by documentary visual journalists. It does so through an in-depth, interview-based approach with 23 journalists in eight countries and identifies the sources of emotional …
Freelance Photojournalists and Photo Editors: Learning and adapting in a (mostly faceless) virtual world
Since 2005, journalism has experienced a series of seismic changes due to economic factors, technological changes, and shifting priorities and news values. Photojournalism has been particularly affected by technology and business model changes, leading more outlets to rely on often geographically remote freelancers at the expense of dedicated photo staffs. These remote working environments and the mediated communication they necessitate have prof…
Visual Mis/disinformation in Journalism and Public Communications: Current Verification Practices, Challenges, and Future Opportunities
Social media platforms and news organisations alike are struggling with identifying and combating visual mis/disinformation presented to their audiences. Such processes are complicated due to the enormous number of media items being produced, how quickly media items spread, and the often-subtle or sometimes invisible-to-the-naked-eye nature of deceptive edits. Despite knowing little about the provenance and veracity of the visual content they enc…
Picturing a quality local news visual: Perspectives from non-specialist journalists
This study explores a key question around local visual news: what do non-specialist journalists regard as a quality news visual? This study focuses on still images as the most ubiquitous building block in the local visual news landscape, whether as thumbnails that are shared with links on social media platforms, as hero images accompanying articles, as photo galleries, or as still frames extracted from videos. Much of what we know about a quality…
Politicians, Photographers, and a Pope: How state-controlled and independent media covered Francis’s 2015 Cuba visit
Pope Francis’s 2015 visit to Cuba provided a unique opportunity for a comparative study of state-controlled and independent media systems. This study, grounded in the interpretivist tradition, uses symbolic convergence theory and fantasy theme analysis to explore how visuals created by United States-based AP Images, United Kingdom-based Reuters, and Cuba-based Prensa Latina reveal the underlying rhetorical visions, ideologies, and priorities of e…
Framing the migration: A study of news photographs showing people fleeing war and persecution
Human migration due to political upheaval is rapidly accelerating, yet scholarly attention to refugees' visual news representations has lagged. Using a visual analysis informed by the transnational writings of Yuval-Davis related to the politics of belonging and the peace/conflict frame literature, 811 images primarily depicting migration from Turkey into Europe in 2015 and submitted to the Pictures of the Year International competition were exam…
What Does a Journalist Look like? Visualizing Journalistic Roles through AI
The question of “who is a journalist?” has animated much discussion in journalism scholarship. Such discussions generally stem from the intersecting technological, economic, and social transformations journalism has faced in the twenty-first century. An equally relevant aspect, albeit one that has hitherto been less studied, is what a journalist looks like. Some studies have tackled this through, for example, examining depictions of journalists i…
Beyond Framing: Influences of subject–photographer interactions on visual journalism
Visual news media's framing has been well studied; however, production factors and cultural conditions involved in photographer–subject interactions have attracted less scholarly attention although they are no less influential in determining the depiction. Guided by social constructionism theory, in-depth interviews with staff photojournalists at a daily community newspaper in the Midwest and an analysis of their work revealed 22 variables that i…
I “Like” That: Exploring the Characteristics That Promote Social Media Engagement With News Photographs
While business models and technological innovations continue to disrupt journalistic practice, global image culture has never been stronger. Developed society is inundated daily with a torrent of images. Yet some of these are barely seen, while others almost instantly accrue scores of likes, shares, and comments. What, then, are the factors that constitute engaging, social photojournalism? Using Q methodology, which bridges qualitative and quanti…
Old Threats, New Name? Generative AI and Visual Journalism
Generative AI applications have been hailed as “transformative,” “disruptive,” and posing a “threat to human journalists and media professionals.” Much of this discourse reflects longstanding concerns about the impact of technological change on both the production and consumption ends of journalism. Perhaps nowhere is this felt more strongly than in visual journalism, where fears about AI replacing cameras and associated implications are rife. Th…
Bodies in Journalism: The View from Behind and in Front of the Lens
Perhaps nowhere is the importance of the body more keenly felt than in visual journalism. With precious few exceptions, journalists who use cameras to produce journalism can’t “call it in” and must be physically on the scene to do their jobs. This comes with unique implications for how these journalists regulate their bodies and perform their roles. But, in the past two decades, the visual side of journalism has been gutted. Fewer staff photojour…
Constitutive Criminology: Beyond Postmodernism
Contrasting Frames: Visual Coverage at Urban and Regional News Outlets in Australia and China
Visual news can be a broad topic and encapsulate a myriad of forms, conventions, and representational content. The present study delves deeply into the image-based side of news to explore how visual news is produced, framed, and presented at four print and digital news outlets in urban and regional parts of Australia and China. We first conducted a qualitative denotative, stylistic-semiotic, and ideological framing analysis of a total of 1,408 im…
Visibility and invisibility in the aged care sector: Visual representation in Australian news from 2018-2021
The skyrocketing number and severity of issues in Australian aged care led to the establishment of the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety in 2018. Yet, compared to other Royal Commissions, media coverage has been relatively muted, and public awareness and engagement with aged care issues has been uneven. Journalists bear a significant responsibility for shaping the national conversation about aged care, and ensuring this demograph…
Who or What Gets Referenced by Whom, How Often, and in Which Ways? Exploring Journalists’ Sourcing Practices in the Context of Aged Care Coverage
Sources are an essential component to journalistic reporting and are a critical determinant of its quality. Who or what is referenced, in which ways, how often, and why matters and can reveal important insights into journalistic practice as well as the values and implicit assumptions of both the news outlets and broader societies under study. Acknowledging this, this study examines sourcing practices of journalists working at four national news o…
Designing the Visual Gateways into Crime News: A Comparison of Youtube Thumbnails from Journalists and Non-Journalists
Thumbnails and link previews play an outsized role in determining which online content is shared, seen, and engaged with. But conventions for these vary depending on the platform and the content creator. Journalists and non-journalists alike use and sometimes design these thumbnails with often striking differences. On some news aggregators, like Apple News or Google News, the bulk of the thumbnails are photographs related in some way to the linke…
Picturing destruction at home and abroad: A Comparative Visual Analysis of Icons and News Values During Disaster
This study uses news photographs and interviews with journalists to explore how Australia's unprecedented 2019-2020 bushfire season was depicted for Australian and non-Australian audiences in order to extend transnational understanding of iconicity's tenets and how news values vary across contexts. It does so first by examining the Sydney Morning Herald's coverage over 3 months and then by contrasting this with international coverage that began i…
Constitutive Criminology: Beyond Postmodernism
Freelance Photojournalists and Photo Editors: Learning and adapting in a (mostly faceless) virtual world
Since 2005, journalism has experienced a series of seismic changes due to economic factors, technological changes, and shifting priorities and news values. Photojournalism has been particularly affected by technology and business model changes, leading more outlets to rely on often geographically remote freelancers at the expense of dedicated photo staffs. These remote working environments and the mediated communication they necessitate have prof…
Beyond Framing: Influences of subject–photographer interactions on visual journalism
Visual news media's framing has been well studied; however, production factors and cultural conditions involved in photographer–subject interactions have attracted less scholarly attention although they are no less influential in determining the depiction. Guided by social constructionism theory, in-depth interviews with staff photojournalists at a daily community newspaper in the Midwest and an analysis of their work revealed 22 variables that i…
Politicians, Photographers, and a Pope: How state-controlled and independent media covered Francis’s 2015 Cuba visit
Pope Francis’s 2015 visit to Cuba provided a unique opportunity for a comparative study of state-controlled and independent media systems. This study, grounded in the interpretivist tradition, uses symbolic convergence theory and fantasy theme analysis to explore how visuals created by United States-based AP Images, United Kingdom-based Reuters, and Cuba-based Prensa Latina reveal the underlying rhetorical visions, ideologies, and priorities of e…
I “Like” That: Exploring the Characteristics That Promote Social Media Engagement With News Photographs
While business models and technological innovations continue to disrupt journalistic practice, global image culture has never been stronger. Developed society is inundated daily with a torrent of images. Yet some of these are barely seen, while others almost instantly accrue scores of likes, shares, and comments. What, then, are the factors that constitute engaging, social photojournalism? Using Q methodology, which bridges qualitative and quanti…
Mapping the emotional labor and work of visual journalism
The study of emotion in journalism has largely been ignored and, when studied, is relegated almost exclusively to media texts. As such, this research aims to rectify this imbalance by focusing on the human side of journalism practice and the emotional labor and work experienced by documentary visual journalists. It does so through an in-depth, interview-based approach with 23 journalists in eight countries and identifies the sources of emotional …
Framing the migration: A study of news photographs showing people fleeing war and persecution
Human migration due to political upheaval is rapidly accelerating, yet scholarly attention to refugees' visual news representations has lagged. Using a visual analysis informed by the transnational writings of Yuval-Davis related to the politics of belonging and the peace/conflict frame literature, 811 images primarily depicting migration from Turkey into Europe in 2015 and submitted to the Pictures of the Year International competition were exam…
Pride in America's Heartland
More than 50 years ago, in 1969, police raided a gay bar in New York’s Greenwich Village, sparking a series of demonstrations, protests, and formal organizing that continues in various forms to this day. The event wasn’t the first time police had raided a gay bar but it became a turning point that increased the visibility of LGBTQ Americans and highlighted their lack of equal rights. Change for a more equitable America came slowly and in unexpect…
Visual Mis/disinformation in Journalism and Public Communications: Current Verification Practices, Challenges, and Future Opportunities
Social media platforms and news organisations alike are struggling with identifying and combating visual mis/disinformation presented to their audiences. Such processes are complicated due to the enormous number of media items being produced, how quickly media items spread, and the often-subtle or sometimes invisible-to-the-naked-eye nature of deceptive edits. Despite knowing little about the provenance and veracity of the visual content they enc…
Managing problematic visual media in natural hazard emergencies
In natural hazard emergencies, visual media (images, videos) document and convey the possible risk, impact, and severity of the hazard. Issues arise when the visuals being circulated, at scale and speed, are manipulated, fake, or are from an unrelated event or location. These problematic visuals can impact how communities interpret the risk of an emergency. Further, when visual media present information (i.e. a cue) in conflict with what an emerg…
Reflections on 25 Years of Visual Communication Quarterly
This research brief reflects on the first 25 years of Visual Communication Quarterly (from its founding in 1994 to 2019) specifically in terms of the geographic diversity featured in its scholarship, the methods and means its authors have relied on to advance their arguments, the specific visuals under consideration, and the authors’ aims, which sometimes overlap with the visuals under consideration and sometimes are distinct from them. Insights …
Exploring the Life Cycle of Smartphone Images from Camera Rolls to Social Media Platforms
Recent critiques contend that “Far too much current writing on photography—even in pieces about social media and photography—fixate on professional photographers,” so this piece seeks to buck that trend by focusing on ordinary smartphone owners and how they use their mobile devices to capture or create, stylize, and represent their worlds. More specifically, this study examines the “life cycle” of images from capture or creation on the device to …
International, innovative, multimodal and representative? The geographies, methods, modes and aims present in two visual communication journals
This comparative review seeks to explore how international, innovative, multimodal and representative the scholarship published in two visual communication journals, Visual Communication ( VC ) and Visual Communication Quarterly ( VCQ ), is over a 25-year period (from VCQ ’s founding in 1994 and from VC ’s founding in 2002 through 2019). Through examining all 544 research articles published in these journals over this timeframe, an understanding …
Picturing destruction at home and abroad: A Comparative Visual Analysis of Icons and News Values During Disaster
This study uses news photographs and interviews with journalists to explore how Australia's unprecedented 2019-2020 bushfire season was depicted for Australian and non-Australian audiences in order to extend transnational understanding of iconicity's tenets and how news values vary across contexts. It does so first by examining the Sydney Morning Herald's coverage over 3 months and then by contrasting this with international coverage that began i…
Journalism Employability in the Modern Newsroom: Insights From Applicant Resumes and Cover Letters
What skills, attributes, and experiences are needed for a visual journalism job in a contemporary print and digital newsroom? Previous attempts at answering this question examine it through insights from hiring managers or news editors, often collected retrospectively or at arbitrary times of the year through surveys; analyses of position descriptions, which are often framed in normative terms; or through analyzing journalism curricula, which per…
Who or What Gets Referenced by Whom, How Often, and in Which Ways? Exploring Journalists’ Sourcing Practices in the Context of Aged Care Coverage
Sources are an essential component to journalistic reporting and are a critical determinant of its quality. Who or what is referenced, in which ways, how often, and why matters and can reveal important insights into journalistic practice as well as the values and implicit assumptions of both the news outlets and broader societies under study. Acknowledging this, this study examines sourcing practices of journalists working at four national news o…
Designing the Visual Gateways into Crime News: A Comparison of Youtube Thumbnails from Journalists and Non-Journalists
Thumbnails and link previews play an outsized role in determining which online content is shared, seen, and engaged with. But conventions for these vary depending on the platform and the content creator. Journalists and non-journalists alike use and sometimes design these thumbnails with often striking differences. On some news aggregators, like Apple News or Google News, the bulk of the thumbnails are photographs related in some way to the linke…
What Does a Journalist Look like? Visualizing Journalistic Roles through AI
The question of “who is a journalist?” has animated much discussion in journalism scholarship. Such discussions generally stem from the intersecting technological, economic, and social transformations journalism has faced in the twenty-first century. An equally relevant aspect, albeit one that has hitherto been less studied, is what a journalist looks like. Some studies have tackled this through, for example, examining depictions of journalists i…
Contrasting Frames: Visual Coverage at Urban and Regional News Outlets in Australia and China
Visual news can be a broad topic and encapsulate a myriad of forms, conventions, and representational content. The present study delves deeply into the image-based side of news to explore how visual news is produced, framed, and presented at four print and digital news outlets in urban and regional parts of Australia and China. We first conducted a qualitative denotative, stylistic-semiotic, and ideological framing analysis of a total of 1,408 im…
Learning the art of scholarly peer-review: Insights from the communication discipline
Many scholars find the peer-review process to be a puzzling, non-transparent, and subjective exercise. Many emerging scholars also learn about the peer-review and publishing process through painful and time-consuming trial and error while still students or as early-career researchers rather than through formal training or guided supervision. Yet many pitfalls exist in this process for new and veteran scholars alike. With this study, grounded in t…
Picturing a quality local news visual: Perspectives from non-specialist journalists
This study explores a key question around local visual news: what do non-specialist journalists regard as a quality news visual? This study focuses on still images as the most ubiquitous building block in the local visual news landscape, whether as thumbnails that are shared with links on social media platforms, as hero images accompanying articles, as photo galleries, or as still frames extracted from videos. Much of what we know about a quality…
Visibility and invisibility in the aged care sector: Visual representation in Australian news from 2018-2021
The skyrocketing number and severity of issues in Australian aged care led to the establishment of the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety in 2018. Yet, compared to other Royal Commissions, media coverage has been relatively muted, and public awareness and engagement with aged care issues has been uneven. Journalists bear a significant responsibility for shaping the national conversation about aged care, and ensuring this demograph…
Public Knowledge and Expertise Under Authoritarian Siege: A Defense of Academic Freedom from Digital Journalism Studies
This article addresses the growing global assault on academic freedom—a cornerstone of democratic societies now under increasing threat from authoritarian regimes. It highlights a global decline in that freedom since its peak 20 years ago, focusing on the United States in 2025 to illustrate rapidly escalating academic silencing, even in a country with well-established democratic freedoms and institutions. Drawing on the collective expertise of in…
Generative Visual AI in News Organizations: Challenges, Opportunities, Perceptions, and Policies
The use of AI-enabled text-to-image generators, such as Midjourney and DALL-E, raises profound questions about the purpose, meaning, and value of images generally, and the production, editing, and consumption of images in journalism specifically.This study explores how photo editors (or their equivalents) in seven countries perceive and/or use generative visual AI in their editorial operations and outlines the challenges and opportunities they se…
Digital Journalism (Studies): An Agenda for the Future
Digital Journalism has an important role to play in encouraging and publishing research with societal relevance that advances digital journalism studies as a field. In this article we discuss the multiple types of articles we publish: research articles, conceptual articles, review articles, advancing methods articles and commentaries. We also introduce you to several great examples of such articles, as well as introduce the growing number of arti…
Political science (27 works) · Sociology (24 works) · Media studies (19 works) · Media Studies and Communication (19 works) · Journalism (17 works) · Computer Science (15 works) · Law (14 works) · Public relations (10 works) · Art (9 works) · Law (9 works)