Sally Young

THE JOURNALISM “CRISIS”

Australia is facing many of the same trends in journalism that are occurring in other countries with mature media industries including declining numbers of journalists, fragmenting audiences, a loss of advertising revenue for media organisations and other challenges to their traditional business models including shifting patterns of news consumption, new competitors for old media and new technologies that demand more time from audiences. However, Australia is also in a unique position. It has a small population and unusually concentrated media ownership; recent newspaper circulation declines have not been as large as in the United States or United Kingdom; and Australias major media organisations have “colonised the Web” to a larger degree than in many other countries. This has led to suggestions that Australian journalism will be immune from many of the most damaging international trends. Yet other evidence suggests Australia is already in the midst of an economic and professional crisis in newspaper journalism and that this is even more advanced than in other countries such as the United States and United Kingdom. This paper tests these competing propositions.

Protest or Error? Informal Voting and Compulsory Voting

Some opponents of compulsory voting claim that rising rates of informal voting point to growing antipathy towards the institution. In order to test this claim we examine recent trends in informal voting, focusing upon some recent figures, particularly those of the 2004 Federal election when there was a sharp rise in informal votes. We suggest that it is not compulsion that is leading to informal voting but rather complexity and its interactions with sociological factors that are brought into play by near-universal turnout.

The Decline of Traditional News and Current Affairs Audiences in Australia

With attention focused on the battle for news ratings between Channels Seven and Nine, an underlying trend has tended to go unnoticed: audiences have been switching off televised news and current affairs programs since the 1990s. Drawing on detailed OzTAM ratings, this article shows how this is particularly true for specific audience segments. Allied with this is the longer-term decline in newspaper circulation. These data raise a central question: are Australians merely switching off ‘outdated’ media such as TV and newspapers (and getting their news from somewhere else such as the internet), or are they switching off the genre of news/current affairs altogether? This article weighs the evidence and concludes that the news audience is fragmenting in particular ways, especially by age, and that some (but certainly not all) groups are going online for news.

NOT BITING THE HAND THAT FEEDS?: Media reporting of government advertising in Australia

In 2004, in the months leading up to the federal election, the Howard government spent over AUS

Sky News Australia

30 million on government advertising. The author of this article, as a critic of high government advertising spending, was regularly quoted in media accounts at the time and was therefore a participant in the events she describes (Young, 2004a, 2004b, 2004c, 2004d). However, it was the opponent Labor Party which, believing itself to be disadvantaged, was most vocal in criticising the governments pre-election advertising, arguing that it was an attempt to sway public opinion in order to gain an early electoral advantage. The Labor Party used a number of media management techniques to try to obtain media coverage of its criticisms. However, collectively, commercial media outlets have profited by nearly AUS

Policy-making in a ‘Cold Climate’ of Ruling Party Benefit: Party Government and the Regulation of Government Advertising in Australia

3 billion from state and federal government advertising over the past decade. As commercial media outlets are economic institutions and their performance is shaped by the market system in which they operate, do they report criticism of high spending on government advertising despite the fact that they have a vested commercial interest in the practice? Analysing media coverage from 2004 reveals that, as propaganda theory would suggest, the more income a media organisation receives from government advertising, the less likely it will report criticisms of the practice.

What is a Journalist?: The view from employers as revealed by their job vacancy advertisements

Despite its very small audience, Sky News (to date, Australias only locally-produced 24-hour news channel) has recently become an important player in the Australian politics/media landscape. In 2007, Sky had a series of successes including hosting the only leaders’ debate of the federal election and being the first channel to predict and announce the election outcome. More broadly, Sky is having a significant impact on the way in which news is reported in Australia. It has become a key journalistic source and has encouraged a faster, longer news cycle and a digital newsroom, content-packaging approach to journalism. Sky is also influencing the behaviour of Australian politicians, increasing their sensitivity to media coverage and prevailing news values and acting as a key site where they try to influence broader media reporting but also shape political outcomes such as leadership battles. This article examines these factors and considers the nature of the “elite–elite communication” that is taking place via Sky News (Davis, 2007, p. 73).

Campaign Advertising and Communication Strategies in the Election of 2013

When analysing party government behaviour, attempts to detect opportunistic policy making (designed to benefit the incumbent) usually focus on electoral law and changes designed to advantage the ruling party in terms of potential votes. However, as Stein Rokkan (1966, 105) noted: ‘Votes count, but resources decide’. A laissez faire approach to regulating government advertising has allowed the federal government to spend over A

News Corporation Tabloids and Press Photography During the 2013 Australian Federal Election

1 billion on advertising over 10 years despite ongoing accusations of misuse for partisan benefit and attempts by multiple actors to tighten the rules. This article, therefore, uses government advertising regulation as a case study of policy making ‘in a cold climate’ where, instead of seeking change, the ruling party benefits from existing rules and is extremely reluctant to change them. Using a hypothesis proposed by Richard S. Katz (2005), it considers what (if anything) might propel policy reform in such a situation.

Government communication in Australia

The period 2009–2010 was characterised as an industry-transforming period of economic and professional “crisis” for news journalism, involving significant journalism job losses in most developed nations. However, at the same time that media employers were laying off journalists in unprecedented numbers, they were still hiring a small amount of new recruits to work as journalists. These job advertisements therefore provide a rich source of information about how employers defined “journalism” during a period of transformation. Focusing on jobs advertised by Australian media companies, this article shows that journalism was not a high priority as they sought to restructure. Employers advertised four times as many jobs for advertising, sales and marketing staff as they did for journalists. When they did seek to hire journalists, employers retained conservative views about the nature of journalism as a trade rather than a profession. They were focused upon centralised, low-pay positions where candidates’ malleability, experience and personal attributes were more important than formal qualifications. Employers’ advertisements also suggested they were ill-equipped to cope with the digital transition and viewed it as something that was occurring outside the domain of many journalism jobs.