With depressing regularity I return to this column to talk about cuts to precious journalism capacity in Australia, usually at Fairfax. This week it’s the equivalent of 120 editorial positions consigned…
Some have criticised the government’s fresh attempt at media reform as benefiting big media companies such as News Corp.
AAP/Dan Himbrechts
If the word “reform” implies genuine public benefit, then real reform has been in short supply for all of the 106 years of electronic media regulation in Australia.
Rural and regional Australians deserve more than tokenistic media coverage of their regions.
AAP/Tracey Nearmy
Before media reform becomes a runaway train, we need to return to the drawing board and rethink the maps that define and guide broadcasters on reporting news for “local areas”.
Media owners are likely to be the biggest beneficiaries of changes announced by Communications Minister Mitch Fifield on Tuesday.
AAP/Mick Tsikas
Mitch Fifield has announced a shake-up of Australia’s media ownership laws. What rules are being scrapped? And what effect might their axing have on Australia’s media sector?
Mitch Fifield seems to have herded enough fractious media cats into the cage to get his media reform package through.
AAP/Lukas Coch
The fact that Communications Minister Mitch Fifield has got a package of changes to Australia’s media laws this far is remarkable considering the ill-fated recent history of attempts at media reform.
ABC managing director Mark Scott’s recent speech to the National Press Club today had the quietly confident tone of a CEO who knows he’s leaving his organisation in broadly better shape than he found it…
In a 2013 Monthly essay Eric Beecher warned of a looming “civic catastrophe” for Australia if the decline of newspapers continued as it had been in the preceding years. The Australian’s report on a Fairfax…
Keith Murdoch (right) with Prime Minister Billy Hughes during the first world war.
AWM
Tom D.C. Roberts has crafted a book full of remarkable insights into a central figure in Australian corporate and political history, a figure hitherto enveloped in family mythology: Keith Murdoch.
In a recent piece for The Guardian, environmental journalist and activist George Monbiot lamented the poor state of environmental journalism globally. He points to the massive conflagration now occurring…
The secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Michael Thawley, wants the public service to open its doors to the outside world.
Lukas Coch/AAP
Michael Thawley, surprised at finding so many closed doors – requiring swipe cards – when he became secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, has now opened most of the internal ones…
Leadership struggles are between ostensible allies.
AAP/Sam Mooy
The trick for the jihadist recruiter is to find someone whose alienation will run the gamut to murder, usually by providing an affirmative role model that speaks to their unease.
As communications minister, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull stated that real innovation in digital media was within the ABC’s charter.
Tracey Nearmy/AAP
Former prime ministers Julia Gillard, Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott have in common highly negative views about the media, according to ABC journalist Sarah Ferguson.
Peter Dutton claimed that journalists should be ‘objective reporters of the news’.
AAP/Sam Mooy
It might be thought a tad ironic that Tony Abbott, having benefited so much from the cheerleading of the News Corp tabloids in his rise to the prime ministership, should now appear to blame the “febrile…
Wilfred Burchett’s career should be judged on all his achievements and not reduced to a single solitary story.
George Burchett