Before media reform becomes a runaway train, we need to return to the drawing board and rethink the maps that define and guide broadcasters on reporting news for “local areas”.
Media owners are likely to be the biggest beneficiaries of changes announced by Communications Minister Mitch Fifield on Tuesday.
AAP/Mick Tsikas
Mitch Fifield has announced a shake-up of Australia’s media ownership laws. What rules are being scrapped? And what effect might their axing have on Australia’s media sector?
APN’s regional arm includes 12 daily newspapers.
Twitter
The sale of APN’s regional newspaper arm could see Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp buy back the papers it sold in the ‘80s.
Placards featuring portraits of murdered journalists were used during a February 11, 2016 demonstration, which took place after reporter Anabel Flores was found dead on a highway in Puebla.
Edgard Garrido/Reuters
My first few days at The Independent in 2004 didn’t go so well. I quit after two weeks. Fortunately I changed my mind, stuck around, and over the subsequent five years worked there in a variety of editorial…
In a 2013 Monthly essay Eric Beecher warned of a looming “civic catastrophe” for Australia if the decline of newspapers continued as it had been in the preceding years. The Australian’s report on a Fairfax…
Twitter campaigns like #letthemstay pose difficult questions for journalists reporting on the issue.
AAP/Tracey Nearmy
With social media blurring the line between public and private more than ever, journalists need to think about how, and to what effect, they use advocacy hashtags in their messages.
George Brandis says the government will adopt the proposed changes to anti-terror laws that criminalise disclosure.
AAP/Lukas Coch
Until a public interest exemption is included in Section 35P, the offence will continue to impact press freedom and have a chilling effect on media organisations’ ability to report on ASIO’s activities.
It may be accepted wisdom that Australians are disengaged from politics, but there are plenty of other indicators to suggest otherwise.
AAP/Richard Wainwright
Cleo has been part of Australia’s media landscape for more than 40 years. We look back on the magazine that “wrote about sex as if we invented it” and its unique brand of pop culture commentary.
Thousands are taking to the Internet to petition for the freedom of convicted murderer Steven Avery.
Kirk Wagner/AP
Joe Saltzman, USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism
The movie ‘Spotlight’ might depict heroic journalists in action, but increasingly, the public views reporters with suspicion – primed by the often harsh portrayal of the press in popular culture.
More than 11 million people tuned in to the primetime special.
NBC
If journalism is supposed to be a force for truth, accountability and enlightenment in the political process, then it appears to be failing on the biggest of stages.
French papers have a range of views on COP21, but even more views about terrorism.
Cathy Alexander
France was prepared to be on the world stage in late 2015. But not like this. As the Paris climate summit reached its halfway mark on Saturday, the local media was still largely preoccupied with the terrorist…
How much screen time should kids get?
Yan Chi Vinci Chow
Research shows that preschool children take characters from popular television shows and movies and blend them together to create complex oral stories.