Susan Rachael Forde

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.

Land, Listening and Voice: Investigating community and Media Representations of the Queensland struggle for land rights and equality

For the most part, the story of the Australian Indigenous land rights struggle has been told by the Australian media – media that have attracted consistent criticism for their portrayal of Indigenous Australians. On the other hand, Australia boasts a vibrant and accomplished Indigenous media sector that has also told the land rights story from a different perspective, albeit to a much smaller audience. The authors are currently a part of a research team seeking to provide a critical analysis of historical and contemporary representations of the land rights movement and the broader struggle for indigenous rights and equality in Queensland. The project seeks to challenge the prevailing dialogue by focusing on the perspectives of people who have been (and still are) involved in the land rights movement. Prioritising and exploring such alternative perspectives will not only present the opportunity to reconsider the role of media representations, but will also enable an Indigenous ‘take’ on them to emerge. This article presents our approach and rationale, discussing the methodological possibilities and challenges of research with Indigenous communities, which ultimately seeks to redress media imbalance and injustice by a retelling that elevates Indigenous voices, stories and pictures.

A Quiet Revolution: Australian Community Broadcasting Audiences Speak Out

Around four million listeners in an average week tune into community radio stations around Australia, primarily to hear local news and information — evidence of a failure by mainstream media to meet their diverse needs. This discussion draws from the first qualitative study of the Australian community broadcasting sector to explore the role being played by community radio and television from the perspectives of their audiences. The authors argue that community broadcasting at the level of the local is playing a crucial role in the democratic process by fostering citizen participation in public life. This suggests a critique of mainstream media approaches and the central place of audience research in understanding the nature of the empowering relationships and processes involved. The authors argue that the nature of community broadcasting aligns it more closely with the complex ‘local talk’ narratives at the community level, which play a crucial role in creating public consciousness. They suggest that this quiet revolution has highlighted the nature of the audience–producer relationship as a defining characteristic of community media.

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.

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.