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 the news photographs that they find most engaging and why audiences gravitate to these images. Acknowledging these dynamics, this multi-method study blends the picture-sorting method with interviews to understand which news photographs audiences find more engaging and to contextualise their ranking choices. This is accomplished specifically through card-sorting activities and follow-up interviews conducted in two communities with 97 people over a three-month period. The results tell us something about the content of the images themselves, their presentation circumstances, and the specific attributes of the audience members that inform their evaluations. These findings, in turn, contribute to the scholarly understanding of visual news quality, as uniquely understood from the perspective of news audiences, and should inform professional practice.