Too close for comfort: journalists’ ethical challenges in regional Australia

Abstract

Staff and budget cutbacks and systemic changes in news media have been widely documented by journalists and scholars, and this qualitative study aims to understand the empirical experience of journalists outside the cities, where isolation, small staff, tight budgets and close communities are the rule. This article reports on part of a study that investigated the experience of journalists in remote and regional media outlets in Queensland and New South Wales. This article explores the more pointed ethical difficulties journalists experience in regional areas, finding these conundrums add layers to decision-making and complexity in the source–journalist relationships. Journalists in regional and remote areas report feeling pressure to take shortcuts in their story writing due to time restraints, to sensationalise or angle stories to suit management agendas, or to write clickbait headlines. They identified these as challenges to their professional practice.

Power Struggles in a Small Town Community: The Intersection of Rural Environmental Protest, Politics, and Hyperlocal News Media

“…The value of hyperlocal news in these settings is to offer nuanced representations of rurality that better align with, and provide visibility for, community-based environmental interests and perceptions of place (Baines 2012; Foxwell-Norton 2017). However, rural journalism faces a range of challenges, including limited financial resources, declining advertising revenue, and difficulties in covering small populations with interests that can converge and diverge in unpredictable ways (Stephens et al 2021). For instance, community understandings of how place and the environment interrelate may be shaped by occupational identities and economic prospects (such as whether citizens are employed in the mining, forestry, tourism, or hospitality industries), or, conversely, by the ways developments threaten the environmental sustainability of much-loved local wetlands, rivers, marine areas, grasslands or forests (Foxwell-Norton 2017; Woods 2003).…”

“…Bowd (2012) argues that journalists and editors in rural communities operate at the crossroads of local political and everyday life because of the need to forge and maintain close relationships. Small pools of source contacts are physically and psychologically proximate community members with whom journalists/editors professionally and socially interact (Stephens et al 2021). Concerns about potential negative effects from critical news coverage can subsequently influence objectivity in hyperlocal reporting (Bowd 2012;Stephens et al 2021).…”

“…Small pools of source contacts are physically and psychologically proximate community members with whom journalists/editors professionally and socially interact (Stephens et al 2021). Concerns about potential negative effects from critical news coverage can subsequently influence objectivity in hyperlocal reporting (Bowd 2012;Stephens et al 2021). As we will show, these concerns can see rural editors and journalists perform a "caretaker" role, whereby they position themselves as "civic custodians" of social cohesion, working to minimize conflict associated with sensitive local issues (Hess and Waller 2020;Mathews 2021).…”