ORCID Profile
0000-0003-3027-7492
Current Organisation
Deakin University
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Research Topics
In Research Link Australia (RLA), "Research Topics" refer to ANZSRC FOR and SEO codes. These topics are either sourced from ANZSRC FOR and SEO codes listed in researchers' related grants or generated by a large language model (LLM) based on their publications.
Top 5 Research Topics
ANZSRC Field of Research (FoR)
Journalism Studies | Media Studies | Communication and Media Studies | Communication studies | Communication Studies | Journalism studies | Communication and media studies
ANZSRC Socio-Economic Objective (SEO)
Government and Politics not elsewhere classified | The Media | Expanding Knowledge through Studies of Human Society | Civics and Citizenship |
Related Links
Publications
Making Connections
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 18-06-2014
Geographies of Journalism
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 09-10-2018
Geo-social journalism: reorienting the study of small commercial newspapers in a digital environment
Publisher: No publisher found
Date: 2014
Local newspapers and coronavirus: conceptualising connections, comparisons and cures
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 09-09-2021
Abstract: Within weeks of the nation-wide COVID-19 shutdown, more than 200 regional and community newspapers across Australia announced they could no longer keep their presses running due to the unprecedented crisis. A drain in advertising spend, a broken business model and the refusal of digital behemoths to pay for content were blamed for their collapse, ironically as audiences’ demand for credible news and information soared across the globe. There is no doubt the COVID-19 crisis has widened existing, deep cracks in the news media industry. In response this article sets out to explore possible solutions and strategies for local newspapers in the post-pandemic media landscape. We take an analogical approach to argue some of the issues that emerged during COVID-19 and strategies used to fight the global health pandemic also present valuable lessons for the preservation of public interest journalism and news at the local level. We conceptualise five coronavirus-related themes that resonate with a much-needed innovations agenda for local newspapers in Australia: (1) support for essential services, (2) warnings of complacency against an evolving biological threat, (3) appreciating the power of the social (4) coordinated government olicy responses and (5) ‘we are all in this together’.
Geo-Social Journalism
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 28-11-2013
Placeification: The Transformation of Digital News Spaces into “Places” of Meaning
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 18-03-2020
The trouble with ‘quiet advocacy’: local journalism and reporting climate change in rural and regional Australia
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 15-06-2023
DOI: 10.1177/01634437221104686
Abstract: Climate activists and environmental communicators stress that addressing the climate crisis requires both global and local advocacy for transformational change-making. While journalists in small, rural communities are known to actively advocate on issues for the common good, there has been little investigation of local media advocacy on climate change in rural Australia: a region at the forefront of global heating. This paper analyses the accounts of local journalists of their media coverage of the School Strikes 4 Climate in rural and regional Australia, as an empirical entry point for a conceptual discussion of local media advocacy in reporting climate change. We find that normative ideas about journalism coupled with polarised community views on climate change hindered these journalists from taking an advocacy stance. We explore and critique the tacit ‘quiet advocacy’ practices used by these journalists reporting on climate in rural and regional Australia.
Editorial: Digital Journalism Studies, Its Core and Periphery
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-01-2022
Making inroads: a critical examination of the ABC’s commitment to local news
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 24-08-2017
Contesting Communities
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-02-2018
Diversifying Diversity in Digital Journalism Studies: Reflexive Research, Reviewing and Publishing
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 15-03-2020
Challenging the News: the journalism of alternative and community media
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 06-2013
BREAKING BOUNDARIES
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-2013
Digital Journalism: The Journal and the Path that Brought us Here
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 21-04-2023
Total Eclipse of the Social: What Journalism Can Learn from the Fundamentals of Facebook
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 19-08-2019
Power to the virtuous?
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 08-03-2016
Journalism and the “Social Sphere”
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 26-10-2017
Local and Hyperlocal Journalism
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Date: 30-07-2018
DOI: 10.1093/ACREFORE/9780190228613.013.837
Abstract: There are more local news outlets operating around the world at any given moment than larger-scale metropolitan newsrooms, and yet it is the latter that have dominated journalism scholarship. As a specific area of inquiry, local journalism—often branded “community journalism” or “hyperlocal journalism”—is a relatively new but rapidly growing field of research in this period of digital disruption. Scholars argue that studying news at the local level can offer rich insights into the role and place of journalism more broadly and reveal much about why people engage with news. Local journalism has been highlighted for its distinct role in reinforcing notions of and building community and the importance of social and public connection among audiences. More recently, attention has shifted to business models sustaining local news given the turbulence facing traditional media and the rapid closure of long-serving local newspapers, especially in the United Kingdom. Scholars have also emphasized the importance of re-conceptualizing local news in a globalized and digital world, highlighting the continued relevance and importance of place to journalists and audiences. Sociology and political science have been the dominant lenses used to examine this sector however, increasingly scholars are turning to cultural studies to understand the relationship between local news and audiences. Most recent research also indicates there is renewed optimism within the sector, especially among news providers who remain embedded and committed entirely to the local areas they serve.
TertiusTactics: “Mediated Social Capital” as a Resource of Power for Traditional Commercial News Media
Publisher: Oxford University Press (OUP)
Date: 20-03-2013
DOI: 10.1111/COMT.12005
The digital pillory: media shaming of ‘ordinary' people for minor crimes
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 07-11-2013
Outdated or innovative? Examining news practices that have stood the test of time at one of Australia's longest-serving local newspapers
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 31-05-2022
DOI: 10.1177/1329878X221104851
Abstract: Researchers studying media innovation and local news tend to emphasise the ‘here and now’, focusing on digital advances as the pathway towards more efficient journalism and viable businesses. This paper argues for the importance of examining media practices that have been preserved and valued over time. It advocates for a temporal reflexivity lens to help inform media innovation strategies and policies for the local news sector in the future. We conduct a fine-grained exploration of one of Australia's oldest family-owned local newspapers, The Buloke Times in the state of Victoria, identifying three main areas of the business that have stood the test of time: respect for tradition and reputations, ‘embeddedness’ in place, and fostering company loyalty and collaboration. Ultimately, we suggest that an appreciation of tradition and continuation may play an important role in understanding the future of digital news in small-town communities.
Hyperlocal Journalism: The Decline of Local Newspapers and the Rise of Online Community News, David Harte, Rachel Howells and Andy Williams (2019)
Publisher: Intellect
Date: 06-2019
Editorial: Digital Journalism (Studies) – Defining the Field
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 16-03-2019
Navigating the terrain: a typology of mapping in journalism studies
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-10-2022
Moral compass: How a small-town newspaper used silence in a hyper-charged controversy
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 03-02-2020
Abstract: A recent controversy over plans to build a mosque in the provincial Australian city of Bendigo provides an interesting case to explore the news practices of one small-town newspaper faced with an issue that triggered an avalanche of hate speech, bigotry and extremist voices. Between 2014 and 2016, there was open conflict inside the city’s municipal chamber, violent street protests, hate c aigns and disinformation on social media. This research considers the role of the Bendigo Weekly in facilitating and shaping debate among local news audiences. Our research reveals that the newspaper deployed silence as a deliberate strategy for countering hatred and to tourniquet debate to the local level. The newspaper argued this was in the interests of serving as a ‘moral compass’. The importance of engaging a ersity of voices in deliberative democracy is widely celebrated in journalism studies. This essay, however, extends scholarship on silence as a form of agency for countering hate speech that is becoming an increasing feature of the digital era.
Examining audience perspectives on local newspaper futures
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 21-10-2022
DOI: 10.1177/14648849221134008
Abstract: When it comes to examining innovation and small-town newspapers, audience expectations and perspectives have received less focus than newsroom practices and processes. This article presents the findings of Australia’s most comprehensive national survey of local newspaper audiences ( n = 4116), which engaged with readers of more than 170 independently owned, small-town newspapers across the nation. The survey was underpinned by a ‘geo-social’ methodology, which provides a multidimensional framework for understanding the ‘place’ of newspapers in the digital age within their specific geographic context, in this case rural Australia. It used ordinal, nominal and qualitative questions to explore respondents’ experiences, histories, expectations and perspectives related to their local newspaper. Respondents were asked about their preferences for reading and receiving local news, what their newspaper can do better, and the policy debates and interventions shaping the sector. Results indicate a continued desire for the printed product, a passion for localness in terms of both production and content, and a greater say for local news audiences on the policies shaping the future of news in non-metropolitan settings.
Editorial: Diversity in Digital Journalism
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 28-05-2019
Communication life line? ABC emergency broadcasting in rural/regional Australia
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 31-08-2017
Reflecting on a painful past
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 27-06-2022
Mining a news desert: The impact of a local newspaper’s closure on political participation and engagement in the rural Australian town of Lightning Ridge
Publisher: Intellect
Date: 06-2021
DOI: 10.1386/AJR_00059_7
Abstract: This article examines how a local newspaper’s closure impacts the way everyday people in a rural Australian town are informed about and engage with political affairs. It draws on a two-month focused ethnographic study in the outback town of Lightning Ridge, New South Wales, and explores people’s media-related practices following the closure of the town’s only newspaper, The Ridge News , in 2015. While social media is considered to have partly filled a news void, there is an increasingly fragmented and less vibrant local public sphere that has led to growing complacency among in iduals about political affairs. Local residents highlight a dearth of reliable, credible information and lament the loss of the newspaper and its role in community advocacy and fostering people’s engagement with political institutions, especially local government.
Charting the media innovations landscape for regional and rural newspapers
Publisher: Intellect
Date: 06-2020
DOI: 10.1386/AJR_00019_1
Abstract: This article charts a scholarly framework for understanding media innovation in Australia’s non-metropolitan news environments. We adopt a geo-social methodology to explore strategies for the betterment of small country newspapers and the societies they serve in the digital era. In doing so, we do not discount the importance of digitization, but contend that a narrow ‘digital first’ focus is eclipsing other important aspects of local news and generating blind spots around existing and evolving power relationships that might impede or foster innovation. We advocate for a six-dimensional approach to shaping innovation for rural news organizations – one that is relational because it foregrounds the connections between digital, social, cultural, political, economic and environmental concerns. Here, the central question is not how country newsrooms can innovate in the interests of their own viability but rather how they can build resilience and relevance in the interests of the populations and environments that sustain them.
Shifting foundations: Journalism and the power of the ‘common good’
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 02-02-2016
Abstract: This essay rethinks the relationship between news media and the universal notion of the ‘common good’ as a key foundational concept for journalism studies. It challenges dominant liberal democratic theories of the press linked to the idea of the ‘public good’ to offer a new way of conceptualizing news media’s relationship to civic life that incorporates power and legitimacy in the changing media world. In doing so, it argues current understandings of journalism’s relationship to the common good also require some re-alignment. The essay draws on Pierre Bourdieu to contend the common good can be understood as a global doxa – an unquestionable orthodoxy that operates as if it were objective truth – across wider social space. How this is carried out in practice depends on the specific context in which it is understood. It positions the common good in relation to news media’s symbolic power to construct reality and argues certain elites generate and reinforce their legitimacy by being perceived as central to negotiating understandings of the common good with links to culture, community and shared values.
Media Hierarchies of Attention: News Values and Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 24-06-2019
Forever In Our Hearts
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 14-06-2018
Truth, reconciliation and global ethics
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Date: 2021
10 Years of Digital Journalism (Studies): The Past, the Present, the Future
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 21-04-2023
Exploring small newspaper attitudes to a collaborative approach with Australia’s primary public broadcaster (ABC)
Publisher: Intellect
Date: 11-2022
DOI: 10.1386/AJR_00105_1
Abstract: Collaborative approaches to news production are increasingly being trialled across the globe in an attempt to alleviate a well-documented crisis in local news. Of particular interest to Australian policy-makers is the BBC Local Democracy Reporting project which funds journalists to be based in local news outlets to provide local government reporting, as well as data journalism initiatives. There is political will that such an approach could be adopted by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation to support the nation’s rural and regional news provisions. This article draws on data from six interpretive focus groups involving 50 news workers from independent Australian local news publishers to consider whether smaller publishers would welcome a collaborative approach with the ABC. It finds that a one-size-fits-all collaborative approach is unlikely to be suitable for the Australian regional media landscape and that more work is needed developing an understanding of an appropriate framework that may be tailored to best meet the needs of different local news outlets.
Hip to be Hyper
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 30-01-2015
Navigating the Scholarly Terrain: Introducing the Digital Journalism Studies Compass
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 16-03-2019
River Flows and Profit Flows
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 20-11-2014
Examining the Social, Civic, and Political Impact of Local Newspaper Closure in Outback Australia
Publisher: Cogitatio
Date: 28-04-2023
Abstract: Scholars across the globe have focused intently on mapping news deserts and gaps where public interest journalism is lacking or in peril. However, little attention is paid to understanding the impacts and changing media-related practices of people who live in communities that lose a designated news service—notably a local newspaper. This article draws on a focused ethnographic study of a small outback mining town, Lightning Ridge (population 2,284), in central New South Wales, Australia. The research was conducted over a two-month period and involved participant observation, 31 interviews with residents and relevant stakeholders, and examination of several media platforms relevant to the town. The article begins with an overview of Australian policy interventions to address the decline of public interest journalism. It then discusses the impact of a local newspaper’s closure via three themes—social, civic, and political. This is important because much of the policy focus in Australia is on the threat “news gaps” present to democracy. However, it is also necessary to understand the nuances of local media’s role in shaping everyday social connections and ritualistic practices and elevating issues to local networks of power. The article concludes by considering how current policy interventions can learn from failed attempts to fill the news gap in Lightning Ridge.
Ritual power: Illuminating the blind spot of births, deaths and marriages in news media research
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 19-02-2015
Abstract: This article conceptualises the role and place of the newspaper births, deaths and marriages column in Western societies and its relationship to news media. It identifies the births, deaths and marriages notices as a ‘blind spot’ within journalism and media research generated by powerful cultural norms and conventions shaping the field. This is exemplified by the ‘mythical’ ide between political economy and culturalist approaches to media studies that has created a gap where people’s everyday practices or the social value of ‘commercial’ content tends to be overlooked in discussions about news media. Drawing more deeply from cultural studies and scholarship around media power and rituals, the births, deaths and marriages column provides a compelling unique illustration of the ways newspapers – especially at the local level – continue to be perceived as central to the social in this changing media world. A qualitative research project into the future of small commercial newspapers in Australia provides rich data for exploring these key ideas.
“Honk Against Homophobia”: Rethinking Relations Between Media and Sexual Minorities
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 11-2013
DOI: 10.1080/00918369.2013.824318
Abstract: The theory of "symbolic annihilation" or "symbolic violence" has been used in academic literature to describe the way in which sexual minorities have been ignored, trivialized, or condemned by the media. This article aims to de-center research from issues of media representation to consider the capacity for minority groups to proactively use new media and its various avenues for interactivity, social networking, and feedback to fight social exclusion. This work suggests that new media has become a space in which the nominally marginal in society may acquire "social artillery"-a term used to describe how sexual minorities utilize their expanding and more readily accessible social connections in digital space to combat instances of homophobia. The research draws on the results of an inquiry into the relation between media and a regional youth social justice group in Australia tackling homophobia. The research demonstrates that the group is becoming increasingly adept and comfortable with using a cross-section of media platforms to fulfill their own objectives, rather than seeing themselves as passive subjects of media representation. This article argues that this sets an ex le for other socially excluded groups looking to renegotiate their relation with the media in regional areas.
Related Organisations
Related Funding Activities
Linkage Projects - Grant ID: LP180100813
Start Date: 10-2019
End Date: 06-2023
Amount: $211,655.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivityDiscovery Projects - Grant ID: DP190101282
Start Date: 08-2019
End Date: 12-2023
Amount: $284,000.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivityLinkage Projects - Grant ID: LP220100053
Start Date: 2023
End Date: 12-2025
Amount: $316,699.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded Activity