Jane Johnston

The new, old journalism: Narrative writing in contemporary newspapers

While there is a significant literature on the rise of narrative journalism in daily newspapers, mostly from the United States, few studies have investigated the breakdown of newswriting styles in the front end of the newspaper, with a specific focus on the use of narrative techniques. This study investigates the writing styles of two daily metropolitan print newspapers in order to provide some concrete data on narrative news reporting in Australia. In a sense, it responds to Mark Kramers comment in 2000 that “no one has added up the reallocated column inches to quantify this change.” The research analyses 5000 articles from the news sections of broadsheets The Australian and The Sydney Morning Herald in 2007 and 2009 to determine a breakdown of writing styles. It found that narrative writing styles had decreased over the two-year period, claiming almost one-fifth of stories in 2007 but less than one-sixth in 2009. It also brings to the discussion in-depth interviews with leading newspaper editors and journalists. The study represents part of a longer-term trend analysis, to provide ongoing insights into print newspapers within the changing media landscape.

The news triumvirate

News agencies, or wire services, are playing a growing role in the contemporary news environment, primarily due to the prevalence of the 24/7 online newsroom and its associated need for speed and volumes of copy. At the same time press releases and other public relations-generated material daily flood the news environment. This paper builds on research into these two fields, trialling a new methodology—one which follows press releases and other public relations material through the uptake by news agencies, in particular the Australian Associated Press, and finally, as published stories in metropolitan online newspapers. While previous research has tracked press releases and news agency copy individually, this study is significant because it follows the three distinct phases in the news cycle and determines how the news agency—the most pervasive and trusted news source—can become the de facto distributor of public relations material. It grounds the study in the work of political economists, who have endeavoured since the 1970s to explain the dwindling quality and quantity of good journalism in leading democracies. This work sets the foundations for a larger study into the production of news in contemporary media environments.

Towards a Narratology of Court Reporting

This article uses the theory of narratology to connect legal discourses and processes with the way the media translate the law into news. It identifies how narratology has been used by other disciplines, notably the law, to provide a framework for better understanding, and uses a range of theories and examples to propose a narratology for court reporting. The research identifies six key elements of narrative and expands these into a three-level schema of story level, discourse analysis and the interpretative context of stories. Finally, the article foreshadows a methodology through which to develop the narratology that follows court proceedings through various stages: from the metanarratives within court to the final production of courts as news. It suggests that such an approach may assist the media to gain greater insights into their involvement within the court system while also providing a deeper understanding between the courts and the media.

The public interest: a new way of thinking for public relations?

Despite some sporadic attention since the 1950s, the concept of the public interest has failed to attract the consideration of public relations scholars in the same way it has other disciplines. This article examines this seeming anomaly while also presenting an overview of how scholars from politics, media, law, anthropology and planning have engaged with and often embraced the public interest, including through key public interest theories or intersections with the work of other theorists, such as Habermas. The article also explains why the public interest historically polarised scholars and suggests how this may account for its marginalisation within public relations. It draws on themes developed in a new book – Public Relations and the Public Interest – in challenging public relations to more fully engage in this space. The article concludes that public relations may benefit from a deeper understanding of the complexity of the public interest and the ways in which it is viewed and adopted in other fields in order to more robustly connect with democratic processes and social change agendas.

Who is a Journalist?: Changing legal definitions in a de-territorialised media space

The emergence of blogging and citizen journalism has created challenges in defining the once-simple terms of “journalist” and “news media”. Internationally, courts, legislators and policy makers are developing new definitions that incorporate a broader understanding of journalism practice, as territories blur and shift across digital spaces. However, a lack of consensus has resulted in jurisdictional clashes, challenges to legislative amendments, appeals to higher courts, and confusion for regulators and practitioners alike. In Australia, recently legislated shield laws have resulted in different definitions across the country’s various jurisdictions. In the United States, court cases relating to defamation and shield laws have been successfully appealed based on differing definitions of the role of a journalist. In New Zealand, a High Court judgement overturned a lower court decision, to find that a blogger could be viewed as a journalist. At the same time, courts internationally are developing policies and guidelines relating to live text-based communication from courts, which also requires them to determine who is permitted to text, tweet or blog from within courtroom. This paper examines how these courts, legislators and policy makers are grappling with the challenges of redefining “journalist” and “news media” while ultimately focusing on the objective of ensuring a free and democratic flow of information.

Churnalism: Revised and revisited

Just under a decade ago the term “churnalism” moved into mainstream journalism discourse, describing in less-than-complimentary terms the recycling process of news production which drew increasingly on wire service copy and public relations (PR) subsidies. Davies’ 2008 book Flat Earth News and Cardiff University researchers Lewis, Williams, and Franklin (2008) were to popularise the term that would become part of the vernacular of an industry on the brink of major change. To be fair, the concept of “churn” and churnalists was earlier coined by Tony Harcup in his book Journalism (Harcup 2004), in which he cites BBC journalist Waseen Zakir’s description of how wire service copy had eroded original news production. However, the “assembly line in the news factory” and the “two primary conveyor belts” of wire services and PR (Davies 2008, 74) were to be seared into the journalistic psyche forever by Davies’ polemic, which laid the blame of churnalism on the “dark arts”, “pseudo-events” and out-ofcontrol commercialism. At that time, Davies saw the internet as something “apart” from churnalism, a way out of this passive process of (re)producing news. He says in his epilogue: “And, of course, there is the Internet ... The real promise of the Internet ... [is] that it could liberate the mass media from churnalism” (Davies 2008, 396). Fast forward almost a decade, and that prophecy is, arguably, no longer plausible. What the internet has done has been to provide new models of journalism—and its progeny churnalism; models that enable the recycling and repurposing of news like never before, through the aggregation of information driven by algorithms; and models that can capture previously out-of-reach data through technologies that can access and facilitate big datasets. The internet has also facilitated a type of “news cannibalism” (Phillips 2011) through which journalism insidiously feeds off itself and swallows up rivals; consumes and regurgitates, or to put it more politely: recycles, recontextualises and repurposes. These models have brought new mega-media players into the realm of churnalism— Google and Facebook, for instance—as major news aggregators have joined the growing and adapting news conglomerates such as News Corp and Comcast. And their impact on the traditional business models of news—that is, Google and Facebook’s increasing dominance of internet advertising which has decimated online advertising for news media—has amplified resource pressures on news organisations. This, in turn, further pushes commercial players to economise their news-gathering models more and to enter into commercial arrangements to help subsidise news costs. This is an ongoing theme in media financial analysts’ assessments of the state and future of the industry (e.g. Beecher 2013; Bornstein 2017; Creighton 2017).Just under a decade ago the term “churnalism” moved into mainstream journalism discourse, describing in less-than-complimentary terms the recycling process of news production which drew increasingly on wire service copy and public relations (PR) subsidies. Davies’ 2008 book Flat Earth News and Cardiff University researchers Lewis, Williams, and Franklin (2008) were to popularise the term that would become part of the vernacular of an industry on the brink of major change. To be fair, the concept of “churn” and churnalists was earlier coined by Tony Harcup in his book Journalism (Harcup 2004), in which he cites BBC journalist Waseen Zakir’s description of how wire service copy had eroded original news production. However, the “assembly line in the news factory” and the “two primary conveyor belts” of wire services and PR (Davies 2008, 74) were to be seared into the journalistic psyche forever by Davies’ polemic, which laid the blame of churnalism on the “dark arts”, “pseudo-events” and out-ofcontrol commercialism.

Coastlines, CAGs and communications

This paper layers communication theory over a cultural context by examining how Community Action Groups (CAGs) have responded to development along Australian coastlines. It analyses how communication and media strategies and techniques have been adopted by the third sector to challenge commercial and government organisations which have proposed coastal development. As noted by Huntsman (2001): ‘It is this appropriation of the beach for the purposes of capitalism, and the contesting ideas about the beach that have captured the attention of critics.’ Indeed these critics, who in this paper are members of strategic alliances, or CAGs, exist all along the Australian coastline. The paper seeks to highlight how the connections that are felt with Australias coasts provide a special impetus and motivation for CAGs which have emerged in response to development along Australias coasts, from Western Australia to New South Wales and Queensland.

Mediatising politics and Australian Indigenous recognition: a critical analysis of two landmark speeches

ABSTRACT This article examines the way in which Australian political discourse and the mediatisation process has contributed to the communication of Indigenous recognition in Australia. In particular, it draws upon two key Prime Ministerial speeches from the past 25 years which dealt specifically with issues of colonisation and maltreatment of Australia’s First Nations peoples. We use Strömbäck’s four phases of mediatisation as a conceptual framework. The first speech is then Prime Minister Paul Keating’s 1992 ‘Redfern Park’ address in which he descriptively acknowledges the invasion of the land by white settlers and its impact on Indigenous peoples; the second, the 2008 ‘Apology’ speech of then newly elected Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in which he apologised to the country’s ‘Stolen Generations’ of First Nations’ people for previous government policies which removed Indigenous children from their families and placed them into white care. These speeches represent significant moments in Australian history and will be examined as case studies, cast within the developing theory of mediatisation. It is our proposition that the two speeches are situated at different entry points of the four-phased continuum of mediatisation and, as such, provide illustrations of the theory in action. Further, these case studies provide an original lens to examine the communication of Indigenous maltreatment and disadvantage – through the ways in which two Australian Prime Ministers presented these issues, through the media, to the Australian public.