A senate inquiry has called for the Commonwealth Bank (CBA) and Australia’s corporate regulator, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), to be investigated by a Royal Commission. The…
User-generated content has become “a central element of the news gathering process,” says the controller of BBC World (English) Richard Porter, in a recently-released international study by the US-based…
Treasurer Joe Hockey’s decision to sue Fairfax Media for defamation over the now-notorious front-page story “Treasurer for sale” raises interesting questions about politicians suing to protect their reputation…
After residents in the NSW coastal town of Kiama woke to the sound of emergency sirens earlier this week, chances are they grabbed a copy of the local newspaper, the Independent, to find out about the…
Many of the men I knew who ran newsrooms in the 80s and 90s were womanisers, drunks, bullies, and gropers. Some were just sleazy. And any woman, of almost any ambition, was cold or bossy or had too many…
In the lead-up to the Abbott government’s first federal budget, there was one standout headline that stole attention from “exclusive” pre-budget leaks: WHY I’VE GOT A PACKER UP MY CLACKER In terms of tabloid…
I remember the day I started work at what was then The Imlay Magnet in Eden. It was 1991 and I had taken the job straight out of my journalism degree at the Canberra College of Advanced Education (now…
In the documentary Gallipoli from Above, an Australian production that recently aired on ABC TV, Hugh Dolan, author of 36 Days: The Untold Story Behind the Gallipoli Landings argues that at 4am on April…
At a time when the print media in Australia is under intense economic pressure the weekend proved to be a super Saturday of change with the revamping, rebadging and launching of major mastheads. Fairfax…
Media companies are failing to deliver transparency about their digital subscriptions, as my recent study about paywalls found. The research of paywalls in eight countries found paid online content presents…
How does a newspaper of strong ideological preferences - such as News Corp broadsheet The Australian - respond when there is a government in office that more closely shares its ideology than did the previous…
UPDATE: Fairfax has responded to a column published on The Conversation – and an earlier version of this story – that linked the introduction of the publisher’s pay wall to an apparent slump in the number…
In the same week that Colleen Ryan’s tell-all book Fairfax: The Rise and Fall hits bookstores, Fairfax’s two biggest metropolitan newspapers will place their content behind a metered digital paywall. If…
RMIT professor Sinclair Davidson has recently defended the actions of journalist Paddy Manning, who was dismissed from Fairfax after writing an article in Crikey critical of what he called “advertorial…
The protection of confidential sources is an ethical and legal minefield for journalists in Australia, despite the introduction over the past two years of so-called journalists’ privilege in several jurisdictions…
Australian media, and in particular the print media, stands out internationally among advanced democracies for its extreme concentration. Three owners – News Limited, Fairfax Media and APN News and Media…