Fiona Martin

Locative News: Mobile media, place informatics, and digital news

Location, locality, and localism have long been important characteristics of news, but their functions have been given a dramatic twist with the advent of locative, mobile media. The capabilities of mobile media devices to determine, sense, incorporate, and conjure with the relative locations of reporting and audiences have emerged as key to alternative, small- and large-scale networked news-gathering and dissemination ventures. This paper explores the kinds of places and spaces these mobile worlds of news-making and consumption entail—and how news is being located in and through such new mobilities.

Sharing News Online

While the term churnalism in this special issue speaks to the negative impacts of extensive news re-use, one pervasive form of news redistribution, social media news sharing, has had the more positive connotations of creative engagement, political participation and cross-promotion. Yet this reading of commendary culture is, as José Van Dijck suggests, largely ideological, anchored in the Silicon Valley rhetorics that support the data capture, data mining and behavioural advertising activities of social media businesses. Our paper critically analyses journalisms’ increasing dependence on social media news-sharing analytics and the implications for news media diversity. We first examine how sharing analytics function as a novel form of news commodification, influencing reporting and editorial practices, with possible implications for news media diversity. We then map the news-sharing ecology, looking at the interlinked business models, ownership patterns and industrial power of social news intermediaries such as Facebook, Twitter, Gigya, Chartbeat and Newswhip, and how these relationships reinforce the significance of analytics to news production. Finally, we propose how the use of news analytics could also help in tracking the changes wrought by social media news sharing, particularly in developing a media policy framework for monitoring digital news diversity and pluralism.

Beyond the ABC's Backyard Radio, the Web and Australian Regional Space

Over its 70 year history the ABC has attempted to map the spatiality of the Australian nation with TV and radio networks- networks designed in part to service regional and remote Australia with information and entertainment. However, until recently the ABCs ability to reflect the diverse experiences, ideas and perspectives of regional Australians in broadcast media was largely restricted by geography, a federalist heritage, limited resources and the concentration of ABC resources in urban centres.

Mobile public service media in Australia: Ubiquity and its consequences

This article examines the roots and consequences of public service broadcasters’ strategic commitment to digital universalism and the ‘anything, anywhere, anytime’ paradigm of mobile media delivery. Using policy analysis, expert interviews and case studies it traces the adaptation of national public service broadcaster to global information capital, linking broadcasters’ pursuit of multiplatform ubiquity with competition policy, the rise of ubiquitous computing and its commercial realization in global mobile media markets. It then analyses the challenges of implementing a public sector mobile agenda in the Australian context, where the scope of mobile broadband uptake is internationally significant. The analysis explores the dynamics of mobile media planning and investment at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the Special Broadcasting Service, identifying new expressions of universalism in online access and accessibility, new costs in research, design, development and delivery, and significant debates emerging around the prioritization, privatization and commercialization of public resources.