TJ Thomson

TJ Thomson
RMIT University | RMIT · School of Media and Communication

Ph.D., M.A., (GradCert) B.A., Communication Arts

About

48
Publications
35,463
Reads
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372
Citations
Introduction
T.J.’s research focuses on how visual journalism is produced—by whom, in what environments, through which processes, and with what results. He also examines visual self-representation on social media and everyday image making. His approach is based on a combination of ethnography (both physical and virtual), interviews, textual analysis, and digital media methods.

Publications

Publications (48)
Technical Report
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The rapid uptake of social media, which Australians now use more than any other type of media, presents many opportunities for accessing information, but also presents the highly significant challenge of misinformation. The sheer volume of information online can be overwhelming and very difficult to navigate. As a result, bad actors seek to undermi...
Article
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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 tha...
Article
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Place matters a great deal to many people and informs much of their perspectives, worldviews, and values. So does identifying who “belongs” in a place and who respects or transgresses on a real or imagined boundary, whether physical, cultural, or social. Sometimes this evaluation happens by evaluating written language or speech. At other times, it...
Article
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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...
Article
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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 ma...
Article
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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...
Article
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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 gen...
Article
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AI services that provide responses to prompts, such as ChatGPT, have ignited passionate discussions over the future of learning, work, and creativity. AI-enabled text-to-image generators, such as Midjourney, pose profound questions about the purpose, meaning, and value of images yet have received considerably less research attention, despite the im...
Article
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KI-Dienste, die Antworten auf Anfragen bereitstellen, wie ChatGPT, haben leidenschaftliche Diskussionen über die Zukunft des Lernens, der Arbeit und der Kreativität entfacht. KI-gesteuerte Text-zu-Bild-Generatoren, wie Midjourney, werfen tiefgreifende Fragen nach dem Zweck, der Bedeutung und dem Wert von Bildern auf, haben jedoch trotz der aufgewor...
Article
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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 Ap...
Article
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Visual language and culture are co-constitutive and constantly evolving. This transformation is more pronounced in the contemporary visual literacy landscape especially with widely used social media and more democratic technologies, such as smartphone cameras, which are used for myriad purposes and in diverse ways. These uses and purposes vary by c...
Article
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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 lo...
Chapter
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Teaching journalism online offers the possibility of having various stakeholders interact in diverse ways. You might find yourself teaching the same students who would take a face-to-face journalism course at your university, with backgrounds and preparation varying among the students in expected ways. Or you might have an online course with hundre...
Article
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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. Ackno...
Book
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Tackling the tech scenario for j-schools How should instructors convey knowledge and teach skills in online course delivery formats, and in an informative and engaging way? This challenge was accelerated with COVID-19, and the trend can be expected to continue. Journalism education, being heavily focusing on experiential learning and face-to-face i...
Article
In a higher education environment massively disrupted by the pandemic, the importance of exploring the efficacy of purposeful, flexible, online learning is essential. Research shows that blended approaches to learning can be active, flexible, and student-centred. However, this research suggests that without human intervention or a bespoke context,...
Article
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Design/methodology/approach This study presents the successes and challenges of introducing a mobile learning resource, Pocket Tutor, to bolster autonomous learning in a supported university learning environment. Pocket Tutor was designed and developed in 2019 and integrated in 2020 and 2021 into a multimedia design class offered at a large univers...
Article
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Older Australians, particularly those in aged-care settings, are frequently the targets of persistent discrimination and marginalisation. Indeed, a dominant narrative in Australia is that the country's ageing population is a burden to the community, and that the influx of older Australians into the aged care system over coming decades is a problem...
Conference Paper
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Following an overview by Keith—based on the introduction to Teaching Journalism Online, a forthcoming handbook, edited by Keith and Cozma, that will be part of UNESCO’s Series on Journalism Education—this 90-minute World Journalism Education Council session with 24 participants was organised around five questions the three stream coordinators posed...
Article
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News media coverage of Indigenous Australian peoples and perspectives is often absent or, when present, unfair or shallow in context or understanding. This raises the question of how much – and what kind of – exposure to Indigenous knowledges and perspectives journalists-in-training receive in their university studies. To find out, this study analy...
Article
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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 significa...
Article
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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 examinin...
Article
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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 so...
Article
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Communication skills are essential to employment and to society’s smooth functioning. Universities are a prime environment for students to learn and hone these skills. However, communication within the academy has historically been conceptualised narrowly due to logocentric forces. When students experience different communication modes, it tends to...
Article
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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 descripti...
Article
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Review of: The Ethics of Photojournalism in the Digital Age , Miguel F. Santos Silva and Scott A. Eldridge II (2020) Abingdon: Routledge, 166 pp., ISBN 978-1-13858-629-1, h/bk, $201.60 ISBN 978-0-42950-468-6, ebk, $53.59 ISBN 978-1-13858-630-7, p/bk, $59.19
Article
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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 H...
Article
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 e...
Article
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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 spe...
Article
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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 dece...
Chapter
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Profile pictures are ubiquitous and salient parts of most online accounts and provide a window not only into individual users but also into the larger online com-munity's culture. Profile pictures have been called "one of the most telling pieces of self-disclosure or image construction" in online communities, and users face diz-zying freedom when d...
Article
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Book
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Whether inscribed in physical media, projected on surfaces, or viewed on digital devices, we find ourselves constantly inundated with streams of visual data. Yet, we know surprisingly little about how these images are made, especially in journalistic contexts where representations are long-lasting and where repercussions can be dramatic. To See an...
Article
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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 Turk...
Book
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Visual journalism is a curious form of interaction usually involving strangers who have their private lives transformed—wittingly or not—into public objects of attention. Sometimes the interaction between journalist and subject is extended and in-depth, sometimes it is brief and shallow, and sometimes it is nonexistent. People are often reactive to...
Book
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我们总是被源源不断的视觉数据淹没,有实体媒体印刷的,投影放映的,也有在数字设备上阅读的。然而我们对这些图像的制作却知之甚少,特别是在影像保留时间长、且可能有巨大反响的新闻界尤为如此。《视觉传播前沿》一书思考了包括意识形态、美学、实用、制度、文化、商业、环境和心理等方面的因素,这些因素都有意或无意地决定了新闻影像的制作,并进而影响人们对这些影像的看法。T. J. 汤姆森探讨了视觉新闻记者制作的画面会让大众产生怎样的期待、体验和反应,也思考了其他的相关因素:大众如何看待镜头和操纵镜头的人?人物的身份是如何用视觉的手法向不同的观众表达并呈现?物质环境和社会建构环境是如何影响这些画面的?汤姆森的研究成果率先为我们展示了记者镜头前的实际和实时体验。《视觉传播前沿》一书让人们考虑制作此类影像所处的环境、...
Article
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Social media is increasingly being used to support people living with HIV (PLWH). Existing research has not examined the use of images on social media. This study explored the benefits and challenges of using visual social media to support health among ethnically/racially diverse middle-aged adults with HIV in a major midwestern city. This qualitat...
Article
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A majority of Americans distrust the news media due to concerns over comprehensiveness, accuracy, and fairness. Since many interactions between journalists and their subjects last only minutes and can be published within seconds, if not live, research is needed to explore how journalists' understandings of their subjects' narratives evolve over tim...
Article
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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, inte...
Article
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Documentary representations of queer life in the United States have historically been absent or context poor, especially prior to the onset of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. Noted photographer Tom Bianchi bucked this trend and offered an alternative view of gay life in the 1970s and 1980s through his 2013 photo book, Fire Island Pines: Polaroids, 19...
Article
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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 co...
Article
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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, an...
Article
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Most research on how the news media cover race focuses either on perspectives of journalists or on their subjects. Few comparative studies concurrently integrate the perspectives of both these groups and virtually none has done this from a visual standpoint. Using the 2015 race-related Mizzou protests as a case study, this research employs in-depth...
Article
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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...
Article
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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...

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