Exploring and bolstering the quality of local visual news

This project explores how local visual news in regional and rural parts of Australia is made and sourced, identifies community members’ expectations of local visual news, and brings together journalists and other stakeholders to discuss how to increase the quality of local visual news and ensure its sustainability into the future.

This project (2023-2026) assesses the quality of local visual news in eight key locations ranging from regional centres to very remote communities across the country. Crucially, it does not just study content in isolation, but investigates the sociocultural and economic forces that shape that content. It identifies the local visual news content that ordinary individuals in each of these communities consume, and uses interviews to capture their expectations of their local visual news. In doing so, this project extends and significantly deepens our understanding of the state of news production and journalism practice and its impact on Australian society and its democratic structures. It does this through a focus on an aspect of news that is rarely the central feature of academic and policy concern: local visual news and its value for increasingly underserved regional communities.

Researchers