Media in the News: How Australia’s Media Beat Covered Two Major Journalism Change Events

Abstract

As the primary mechanism through which journalistic labour is organized within a newsroom, news beats are an important feature of journalistic research. However, within the extensive research that examines beat reporting and its specialties, there is little that examines how the media covers itself -or the media beat. This study explores the media beat in Australia, examining how media covered two major media change events: the loss of jobs at newspaper publisher Fairfax in 2012 and the potential closure of wire service Australian Associated Press (AAP) in 2020. In analysing reporting of change events in journalism through a framework of metajournalistic discourse, and through an analysis of 200 items, this study found that 'media beat' journalists disclosed more information about the adverse effects of job loss and disruption on news supply in 2020 than in 2012. Intermedia competition often shaped disclosure, with journalists reporting on change in rival media companies. Yet, how 'media beat' reporters covered these changes varied in both years. The study also found that stakeholders from within and outside of media contribute to the development of change narratives in journalism by offering robust discussion of the implications of industry transformation for news quality and informed publics.

Oral history and media: platforms for collecting witness stories

“…The process of interdisciplinarity is multifaceted, oral history methods were increasingly used to create a variety of narratives, from educational to graphic (Hudoshnyk, 2021), and the practices of interaction between oral history and the media becoming the subject of both admiration and devastating criticism in academic research (Feldstein, 2004;Freund, 2015;Zion et al, 2021;Hudoshnyk, & Temchenko, 2022). It became all the more relevant in times of crisis situations when oral history was objectified "somewhere in the middle between fast journalism, in-depth psychoanalysis and social sciences" (Cave, & Sloan, 2014).…”

Examining audience perspectives on local newspaper futures

“…The sector was crippled by a rapid decline in media-advertising spend as Australian businesses cut back on all but essential costs to survive the pandemic. It followed more than a decade of cuts, layoffs and closures across rural and regional newsrooms, altering the capacity of these print newspaper and local television outlets to serve their communities (Zion et al, 2020). In the 10-year period from 2008 to 2018, 106 local and regional newspaper titles (many suburban) closed across the country, leaving 21 local government areas without coverage from a single local newspaper (in either print or online formats), including 16 local government areas in regional Australia.…”

Layoffs, inequity and COVID-19: A longitudinal study of the journalism jobs crisis in Australia from 2012 to 2020

“…And those who lost their jobs faced decidedly uncertain futures. In longitudinal research tracking the post-journalism careers of Australian journalists who had been made redundant, many of those surveyed revealed they were experiencing job precarity (Zion et al, 2018). Further, a significant minority had moved into strategic communications or public relations (Zion et al, 2018).…”

“…In longitudinal research tracking the post-journalism careers of Australian journalists who had been made redundant, many of those surveyed revealed they were experiencing job precarity (Zion et al, 2018). Further, a significant minority had moved into strategic communications or public relations (Zion et al, 2018). However, the flow of journalists into PR (and sometimes back again) is not new (Carey, 1965; Fisher, 2014; MacNamara, 2014, 2016) and our analysis also supports these previous results.…”

“…For instance, it is estimated that in 2011 news publisher Fairfax Media employed about 1000 editorial staff across the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Australian Financial Review , and its Sunday papers, The Sun Herald and The Sunday Age . By mid-2017, however, half of those jobs were gone (Zion et al, 2018) (including the job of one of this paper’s authors). And then the coronavirus wielded its scythe.…”