Lisa Waller
Biographic Data
| ID | 3587510 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lisa Waller |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lisa |
| FAMILY NAME | Waller |
| SIGNATURE | WALLER L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Deakin University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2689-8010 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 48 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 167 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 48 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Permission to break: The news coverage of broken election promises
In contemporary representative democracies, election promises are essential to fulfilling the classical democratic ideal of establishing a clear connection between the interests of the public and government actions. Recent evidence has established that governing party(s) often fulfill most of their election promises, yet the public holds the opinion that governments can’t be trusted to keep their promises. One of the explanations put forward for …
True crime podcasts, journalistic authority, and the transforming archive
True crime journalism has long relied on crime’s archive – police records, court proceedings, media reports, and witness testimony – to construct narratives of crime and justice. While existing scholarship has examined the narrative and ethical dimensions of true crime media, less attention has been paid to how emerging formats engage with and reshape crime’s archive through journalistic practice. Focussing on newsroom-produced true crime podcast…
Understanding election promise tracking as a form of fact-checking
Fact checking has gained prominence as a form of journalism for countering mis- and disinformation, however, little scholarly attention has been paid to the Campaign Promise Evaluation Tools (CPETs) operated by some fact checking outfits. Similarly, there has been little consideration given to the differences and similarities between CPETs operated by political science researchers and journalists. Taking Australia’s RMIT ABC Fact Check’s Promise …
Climatic Tantrums and Weathered Memories: Cycles of Seasonal Reporting on Dust Storms in Australian Newspapers 1992–2024
Bodying the War Correspondent: Deploying Creative Practice to Explore the Reporter's Body as a Sense-Making Tool
In her 2021 essay, Bodying the Journalist, Chantal Francoeur acknowledges that journalists’ bodily experiences – “that complex assemblage of impulses, reactions, senses, emotions, energies and physical states” – are not easy to categorise or analyse. She argues that foregrounding the body both as an object of study and as a key resource for conducting research lies in part with journalists themselves investigating how they use their bodies as sen…
Election Promise Tracking: Extending the Shelf Life of Democracy in Digital Journalism Practice and Scholarship
While global fact-checking practice pivots away from its political origins towards debunking projects for platform partners, the subfield of election promise tracking provides an interesting counterpoint. Little scholarly attention has been paid to the international rise and significance of Campaign Pledge Evaluation Tools (CPETs), which are digital platforms that directly inform voters about the fulfilment of election campaign promises throughou…
First Nations media in the Closing the Gap era: Navigating the New Self-Determination
In 2020, a new Closing the Gap Agreement and an associated Joint Communications Strategy committed the Australian Government and state and territory governments to working with First Nations media to advance Closing the Gap aims, after lobbying by First Nations Media Australia. The new attention to First Nations media occurs after two decades of government disregard. We observe how First Nations media organisations have consistently advocated for…
It hardly made a ripple: South Australia's Murray-Darling Basin Royal Commission Report in rural news discourse
In January 2019, the South Australian Government released the report of its Royal Commission into the Murray-Darling Basin, which investigated the implementation of the Basin Plan and allegations of water theft in upstream states. This study analyses the report and specialist rural media coverage of it. Previous research has found that rural media imaginaries of the rural space validate the 'productive' use of land and reinforce the discursive po…
A higher education pedagogy for settler listening with Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria
This article focuses on a higher education pedagogy of reading the exemplary novel of Indigenous Australia, Carpentaria (2006) by Waanyi author, Alexis Wright.The multiply awarded and multiply translated novel gives an epic view of contemporary Aboriginal life.Its dramatization of listening relations is profoundly insightful for the current historical moment in Australian Indigenous-settler relations.Our pedagogy of settler listening emerges from…
Untapped Potential? Exploring the ‘Latent’ Local Newspaper Reader in Digital Spaces
When it comes to understanding news audiences in rural areas, scholars often focus on declining readership and the challenge of how to encourage existing audiences to pay for content. There too has been burgeoning interest in news avoidance more broadly in digital spaces, with an emphasis on studying those who actively or intentionally resist or reject the news. This paper explores a gap in the research by seeking to understand the conditions and…
A Poetic Inquiry Into Journalists’ Experiences of Covering Institutional Child Sexual Abuse
This article introduces a spectrum of poetic approaches that have emerged in the analysis of research interviews with journalists who covered Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse and related stories. Six poem excerpts, from two of the poets involved in the project, are presented to explore how engaging with a spectrum of approaches—from found poetry transcription to generative methods—can be used to shed…
Revelation, Reckoning and Recovery: Bearing Witness Proximally in Local Journalism
At a time when local journalism is under threat, regional newsrooms can play a crucial role in working with communities to confront shameful truths and profound failures. The regional city of Ballarat emerged as an “epicentre” of clergy sexual abuse through Australia’s landmark Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2013–2017). This article examines how the regional city’s newspaper, The Courier, bore witness to thes…
[Can't] Delete: An Intervention in Mainstream News Media Representations of Image-Based Sexual Abuse
Cases of image-based sexual abuse (IBSA) - the creation or distribution of private sexual or nude images - are on the rise across the world and internet, but the public does not understand this issue as a form of sexual violence. This is due in part to the role of journalists and the news media as the first site where the general audience hears about new issues. Research into IBSA has not considered the role of the news media to educate the publi…
Enduring silence: Racialized news values, white supremacy and a national apology for child sexual abuse
This article examines news coverage of Australia's 2018 National Apology to Victims of Institutional Child Sexual Abuse to reveal how conventional news values and practices produce racialised hierarchies of media attention that routinely position whiteness at the pinnacle. Via content analysis of media coverage, informed by critical discourse analysis, we focus on whether news reporting of the Apology reflected the Royal Commission's stated commi…
Communities of practice in the production and resourcing of fact-checking
This article considers the ways in which national and international institutional alliances and professional organizations form the basis of a collaborative approach to the resourcing, production, and distribution of fact-checks through a case study of CoronaCheck, the COVID-19 fact-checking project of Australia’s RMIT ABC Fact Check. In doing so, it builds on a theorization that conceives of journalism as a “community of practice.” Two themes em…
Examining audience perspectives on local newspaper futures
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’ meth…
Ceding ground as a strategic concession in fact-checking: Shifting practice to shift power
This article looks beyond functionalist accounts to consider how fact-checking organisations and practitioners interact with traditional and alternative sites of media power: holding and negotiating that power in their own right while interfacing collaboratively and strategically with those working in adjacent fields. Interpreted through this theoretical prism, interviews and a content analysis reveal how RMIT ABC Fact Check used its CoronaCheck …
Analysing Innovation in Indigenous News: Deaths Inside
In 2018, The Guardian won the award for Innovation at the Walkleys, Australia’s most prestigious awards for journalism, for its data journalism project, Deaths Inside, which has catalogued 164 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander deaths in custody between 2008 and 2020. This article takes a case study approach to explore the changing relations that have contributed to the development of Deaths Inside; how these have afforded an expansion of the …
Expanding Boundaries in Indigenous News: Guardian Australia, 2018–2020
Guardian Australia has made a strong commitment to covering Indigenous affairs, offering an alternative approach to other mainstream Australian news media since its establishment in 2013. In this article, the concepts of boundary work and boundary-drawing power provide a framework for analysing how Guardian Australia negotiates, extends, and concedes its professional journalistic ground in ways that support more diversity in news-making in the sp…
Local newspapers and coronavirus: Conceptualising Connections, Comparisons and Cures
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 n…
Local Journalism in Australia
The future of public interest journalism has generated debate in recent years as governments across the Western world grapple with the question of how to regulate the changing digital environment and super powers including Facebook and Google. In Australia, there has been especially urgent public and policy discussion around the future of public interest journalism at the local level. There have been closures of local radio stations and major red…
Analysing the Indigenous News Network in Action: IndigenousX, The Guardian and the Wakul App
Un-braiding deficit discourse in Indigenous education news 2008–2018: Performance, attendance and mobility
This article presents a time sensitive critical text analysis of Australian news reporting that has identified, mapped and analysed news reporting about Indigenous education from 2008 to 2018. Three key themes were identified: school attendance; performance as measured by national testing, and boarding school education. A braiding metaphor is introduced to illustrate how the three themes operated independently over time, intersected and together …
Rural radio and the everyday politics of settlement on Indigenous land
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Country Hour radio programmes are produced regionally and promote specific understandings of rurality. This article presents an analysis that shows Indigenous people and issues are rarely sources or topics in Country Hour, and that stories about Indigenous land use are generally broadcast only if the land is used in a way that is seen as ‘productive’ through settler colonial eyes. It also argues the progr…
Charting the media innovations landscape for regional and rural newspapers
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 gen…
Media Hierarchies of Attention: News Values and Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse
Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2013–17) was a highly significant legal exercise that devoted considerable expertise and resources to bearing witness and breaking silences surrounding child sexual abuse in all of its 57 case studies. In analysing the national media coverage we take a critical position to ask to what extent was this groundbreaking exercise in listening for justice reflected or ampli…
The digital pillory: Media shaming of ‘ordinary' people for minor crimes
This paper discusses the intensified role of the media in shaming ‘ordinary' people when they commit minor offences. We argue that shaming is a powerful cultural practice assumed by the news media in western societies after it was all but phased out as a formal punishment imposed by the judiciary during the early nineteenth century. While shaming is no longer a physically brutal practice, we reconceptualize the idea of a ‘lasting mark of shame' a…
Raising the Volume: Indigenous Voices in News Media and Policy
This article explores Indigenous contributions to shaping public and policy agendas through their use of the news media. It reports on research conducted for the Australian News Media and Indigenous Policy-making 1988-2008 project that is investigating relationships between the representation of Indigenous peoples in public media and the development of Indigenous affairs policies. Interviews with Indigenous policy advocates, journalists and publi…
Hip to be Hyper: The subculture of excessively local news
Local news is nothing new, but there is an unmistakable hype around its reinvention in the digital age through the hyperlocal phenomena. This article applies the lens of subculture theory to move beyond questions related to who produces hyperlocal news, how to pay for it and its democratic potential, to focus on its social and cultural values and meanings. In doing so, it engages with the normative and political economy approaches that dominate t…
Charting the media innovations landscape for regional and rural newspapers
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 gen…
Communities of practice in the production and resourcing of fact-checking
This article considers the ways in which national and international institutional alliances and professional organizations form the basis of a collaborative approach to the resourcing, production, and distribution of fact-checks through a case study of CoronaCheck, the COVID-19 fact-checking project of Australia’s RMIT ABC Fact Check. In doing so, it builds on a theorization that conceives of journalism as a “community of practice.” Two themes em…
Moral compass: How a small-town newspaper used silence in a hyper-charged controversy
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 campaigns and disinformation on social media. This research …
Examining audience perspectives on local newspaper futures
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’ meth…
The Intervention of Media Power in Indigenous Policy-Making
This article explores how media power impacts on policy-making in Indigenous affairs in Australia through an examination of the 2007 Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER). The article draws on interviews with a range of actors in the policy constellation to discuss three intersecting factors contributing to this media-driven announcement: the Howard government's political and policy aims for Indigenous affairs; policy bureaucrats' increasi…
The Snowtown we know and love’: Small newspapers and heinous crimes
This paper examines the role of small newspapers in Australia when bizarre and shocking crimes are committed locally. These crimes often attract intense media attention that casts a net of shame across entire townships through their representation as places of fascination and fear in the public imagination. We take a practice approach in the tradition of Pierre Bourdieu to explore the complex editorial considerations, news judgements and communit…
Geo-Social Journalism: Reorienting the study of small commercial newspapers in a digital environment
This paper begins by problematizing the use of “community” to define and theorize small commercial media outlets that have geography as their primary characteristic—particularly hyper local and small traditional newspapers connected to larger media organizations in digital space. We then extend the concept of “geo-social news” to outline “geo-social journalism” as a specific form of news work currently grouped under the “community media” umbrella…
Expanding Boundaries in Indigenous News: Guardian Australia, 2018–2020
Guardian Australia has made a strong commitment to covering Indigenous affairs, offering an alternative approach to other mainstream Australian news media since its establishment in 2013. In this article, the concepts of boundary work and boundary-drawing power provide a framework for analysing how Guardian Australia negotiates, extends, and concedes its professional journalistic ground in ways that support more diversity in news-making in the sp…
Un-braiding deficit discourse in Indigenous education news 2008–2018: Performance, attendance and mobility
This article presents a time sensitive critical text analysis of Australian news reporting that has identified, mapped and analysed news reporting about Indigenous education from 2008 to 2018. Three key themes were identified: school attendance; performance as measured by national testing, and boarding school education. A braiding metaphor is introduced to illustrate how the three themes operated independently over time, intersected and together …
Water Wars: A “Critical Listening In” to Rural Radio Discourse on a River System in Trouble
For news media on the earth's driest continent, changes in the health and politics of Australia's largest river system, the Murray-Darling, have been a major national focus for decades. In recent times, climate crisis, drought and policy failure have combined to threaten its future, putting the issue under intense public scrutiny. This article offers a critical discourse analysis of specialist rural radio coverage of the issue in 2018–19. It iden…
Bilingual Education and the Language of News
This paper presents evidence that shows for the first time that news media influence was a significant factor in the decision to dismantle the Northern Territory's bilingual education policy in 2008. It identifies and discusses five media-related overlays that have affected public discussion and policymaking during the life of the policy. They include the media's role in informing public understanding of the policy; media representation of Indige…
The Listening Key: Unlocking the Democratic Potential of Indigenous Participatory Media
This article explores how a listening approach might address the complex challenges of researching the relationship between Indigenous participation in media and mainstream policy-making processes. An overview of contemporary Indigenous media demonstrates how digital and social media have built on the vibrant and innovative Indigenous media tradition, and enabled a proliferation of new Indigenous voices. But do the powerful listen to Indigenous-p…
River Flows and Profit Flows: The powerful logic driving local news
The importance of local news is gaining traction with industry and in journalism scholarship. But there is a need for careful analysis of what it means to be “local” and how we might theorise the role and place of news organisations and journalists who serve local audiences. This paper draws on three qualitative case studies of local newspapers serving small towns and cities in Australia to generate concepts that can be used to deepen understandi…
Local newspapers and coronavirus: Conceptualising Connections, Comparisons and Cures
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 n…
Rural radio and the everyday politics of settlement on Indigenous land
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Country Hour radio programmes are produced regionally and promote specific understandings of rurality. This article presents an analysis that shows Indigenous people and issues are rarely sources or topics in Country Hour, and that stories about Indigenous land use are generally broadcast only if the land is used in a way that is seen as ‘productive’ through settler colonial eyes. It also argues the progr…
How television moved a nation: Media, change and Indigenous rights
This article examines the role of television in Australia’s 1967 referendum, which is widely believed to have given rights to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. It presents an analysis of archival television footage to identify five stories that moved the nation: Australia’s shame, civil rights and global connections, admirable activists, ‘a fair go’ and consensus. It argues that television shaped the wider culture and opened a channe…
Bodying the War Correspondent: Deploying Creative Practice to Explore the Reporter's Body as a Sense-Making Tool
In her 2021 essay, Bodying the Journalist, Chantal Francoeur acknowledges that journalists’ bodily experiences – “that complex assemblage of impulses, reactions, senses, emotions, energies and physical states” – are not easy to categorise or analyse. She argues that foregrounding the body both as an object of study and as a key resource for conducting research lies in part with journalists themselves investigating how they use their bodies as sen…
Revelation, Reckoning and Recovery: Bearing Witness Proximally in Local Journalism
At a time when local journalism is under threat, regional newsrooms can play a crucial role in working with communities to confront shameful truths and profound failures. The regional city of Ballarat emerged as an “epicentre” of clergy sexual abuse through Australia’s landmark Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2013–2017). This article examines how the regional city’s newspaper, The Courier, bore witness to thes…
Ice towns: Television representations of crystal methamphetamine use in rural Australia
The Australian news media regularly presents crystal methamphetamine use as a non-metropolitan ‘epidemic’ sweeping through country towns with devastating consequences for affected communities. Considerations of place and the notion of rurality are therefore crucial to understanding how these media representations are constructed and their power to influence national understandings of rural people, places and policy debates. In order to explore th…
First Nations media in the Closing the Gap era: Navigating the New Self-Determination
In 2020, a new Closing the Gap Agreement and an associated Joint Communications Strategy committed the Australian Government and state and territory governments to working with First Nations media to advance Closing the Gap aims, after lobbying by First Nations Media Australia. The new attention to First Nations media occurs after two decades of government disregard. We observe how First Nations media organisations have consistently advocated for…
Making inroads: A critical examination of the ABC's commitment to local news
This article examines the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's (ABC) provision of local news to rural and regional communities. Drawing on critiques of the public sphere and its relationship to public service media, it analyses submissions to a Parliamentary Bill to include rural and regional amendments in the ABC's Charter. The analysis reveals three key concerns: resourcing and restructuring of rural/regional newsrooms, declining local news co…
The Snowtown we know and love’: Small newspapers and heinous crimes
This paper examines the role of small newspapers in Australia when bizarre and shocking crimes are committed locally.These crimes often attract intense media attention that casts a net of shame across entire townships through their representation as places of fascination and fear in the public imagination.We take a practice approach in the tradition of Pierre Bourdieu to explore the complex editorial considerations, news judgements and community …
The Snowtown we know and love’: Small newspapers and heinous crimes
This paper examines the role of small newspapers in Australia when bizarre and shocking crimes are committed locally. These crimes often attract intense media attention that casts a net of shame across entire townships through their representation as places of fascination and fear in the public imagination. We take a practice approach in the tradition of Pierre Bourdieu to explore the complex editorial considerations, news judgements and communit…
Bilingual Education and the Language of News
This paper presents evidence that shows for the first time that news media influence was a significant factor in the decision to dismantle the Northern Territory's bilingual education policy in 2008. It identifies and discusses five media-related overlays that have affected public discussion and policymaking during the life of the policy. They include the media's role in informing public understanding of the policy; media representation of Indige…
Raising the Volume: Indigenous Voices in News Media and Policy
This article explores Indigenous contributions to shaping public and policy agendas through their use of the news media. It reports on research conducted for the Australian News Media and Indigenous Policy-making 1988-2008 project that is investigating relationships between the representation of Indigenous peoples in public media and the development of Indigenous affairs policies. Interviews with Indigenous policy advocates, journalists and publi…
Geo-Social Journalism: Reorienting the study of small commercial newspapers in a digital environment
This paper begins by problematizing the use of “community” to define and theorize small commercial media outlets that have geography as their primary characteristic—particularly hyper local and small traditional newspapers connected to larger media organizations in digital space. We then extend the concept of “geo-social news” to outline “geo-social journalism” as a specific form of news work currently grouped under the “community media” umbrella…
The digital pillory: Media shaming of ‘ordinary' people for minor crimes
This paper discusses the intensified role of the media in shaming ‘ordinary' people when they commit minor offences. We argue that shaming is a powerful cultural practice assumed by the news media in western societies after it was all but phased out as a formal punishment imposed by the judiciary during the early nineteenth century. While shaming is no longer a physically brutal practice, we reconceptualize the idea of a ‘lasting mark of shame' a…
The Intervention of Media Power in Indigenous Policy-Making
This article explores how media power impacts on policy-making in Indigenous affairs in Australia through an examination of the 2007 Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER). The article draws on interviews with a range of actors in the policy constellation to discuss three intersecting factors contributing to this media-driven announcement: the Howard government's political and policy aims for Indigenous affairs; policy bureaucrats' increasi…
Indigenous Media Practice
This article introduces the Indigenous Media Practice special issue through a discussion of the aims and scope of the edition. It identifies three major currents in contemporary international research on media and indigeneity, which are reflected in the suite of scholarship presented here. The first is the importance of continuing to critically analyse media systems, institutions and policies that enable and constrain the production and dissemina…
River Flows and Profit Flows: The powerful logic driving local news
The importance of local news is gaining traction with industry and in journalism scholarship. But there is a need for careful analysis of what it means to be “local” and how we might theorise the role and place of news organisations and journalists who serve local audiences. This paper draws on three qualitative case studies of local newspapers serving small towns and cities in Australia to generate concepts that can be used to deepen understandi…
Hip to be Hyper: The subculture of excessively local news
Local news is nothing new, but there is an unmistakable hype around its reinvention in the digital age through the hyperlocal phenomena. This article applies the lens of subculture theory to move beyond questions related to who produces hyperlocal news, how to pay for it and its democratic potential, to focus on its social and cultural values and meanings. In doing so, it engages with the normative and political economy approaches that dominate t…
The Listening Key: Unlocking the Democratic Potential of Indigenous Participatory Media
This article explores how a listening approach might address the complex challenges of researching the relationship between Indigenous participation in media and mainstream policy-making processes. An overview of contemporary Indigenous media demonstrates how digital and social media have built on the vibrant and innovative Indigenous media tradition, and enabled a proliferation of new Indigenous voices. But do the powerful listen to Indigenous-p…
Mediatisation, Marginalisation and Disruption in Australian Indigenous Affairs
This article considers how changing media practices of minority groups and political and media elites impact on democratic participation in national debates. Taking as its case study the state-sponsored campaign to formally recognise Indigenous people in the Australian constitution, the article examines the interrelationships between political media and Indigenous participatory media—both of which we argue are undergoing seismic transformation. D…
Indigenous voices and mediatized policy-making in the digital age
This article explores the potential of emerging digital cultures for Indigenous participation in policy debates in the rapidly changing Australian media landscape. From the Zapatista's ‘netwar’ to the ‘hashtag activism’ of IdleNoMore, Indigenous people have pioneered innovative uses of digital media for global connectivity and contestation. Digital and social media open up unprecedented opportunities for voice, and, in theory, participation in de…
Australian indigenous public spheres: From the ground up
This article analyses the 1998/99 ‘Don’t cut off our tongues’ campaign by the Yolngu people from North-East Arnhem Land in Australia’s Northern Territory. This public sphere activity involved a sophisticated media strategy to defend the right to educate their children in Yolngu languages, as well as English. It shows that through a range of media-related practices based in their land, the Yolngu were integral in preventing the Northern Territory …
Keystone media: The Australian and Indigenous affairs
This article conceptualises The Australian as the nation's 'keystone media' on Indigenous affairs. Nielsen's term 'keystone media' captures the critical importance of particular news outlets that play what he terms an outsize role in defining the state and structure of wider media and political environments. The article analyses the factors at play in The Australian's sponsorship of a particular political agenda for this complex field of social p…
Indigenous Media Studies in Australia: Traditions, Theories and Contemporary Practices
Kerry McCallum and Lisa Waller locate the diverse, abundant and dynamic field of Indigenous media within the rapidly changing broader Australian media landscape. While there are some parallels with the ethnic media sector, this chapter shows that the unique development of the Indigenous media sector has been determined by Australia’s colonial past and its complex political and policy history. Simultaneously, Indigenous people have developed their…
Local Journalism in a Digital World
The majority of journalism graduates find themselves working in local settings at some point during their careers; this book will equip them with an excellent understanding of the field today, and will also provide rich theoretical insights
Making inroads: A critical examination of the ABC's commitment to local news
This article examines the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's (ABC) provision of local news to rural and regional communities. Drawing on critiques of the public sphere and its relationship to public service media, it analyses submissions to a Parliamentary Bill to include rural and regional amendments in the ABC's Charter. The analysis reveals three key concerns: resourcing and restructuring of rural/regional newsrooms, declining local news co…
How television moved a nation: Media, change and Indigenous rights
This article examines the role of television in Australia’s 1967 referendum, which is widely believed to have given rights to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. It presents an analysis of archival television footage to identify five stories that moved the nation: Australia’s shame, civil rights and global connections, admirable activists, ‘a fair go’ and consensus. It argues that television shaped the wider culture and opened a channe…
Ice towns: Television representations of crystal methamphetamine use in rural Australia
The Australian news media regularly presents crystal methamphetamine use as a non-metropolitan ‘epidemic’ sweeping through country towns with devastating consequences for affected communities. Considerations of place and the notion of rurality are therefore crucial to understanding how these media representations are constructed and their power to influence national understandings of rural people, places and policy debates. In order to explore th…
Media Hierarchies of Attention: News Values and Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse
Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2013–17) was a highly significant legal exercise that devoted considerable expertise and resources to bearing witness and breaking silences surrounding child sexual abuse in all of its 57 case studies. In analysing the national media coverage we take a critical position to ask to what extent was this groundbreaking exercise in listening for justice reflected or ampli…
Local Journalism in Australia
The future of public interest journalism has generated debate in recent years as governments across the Western world grapple with the question of how to regulate the changing digital environment and super powers including Facebook and Google. In Australia, there has been especially urgent public and policy discussion around the future of public interest journalism at the local level. There have been closures of local radio stations and major red…
Analysing the Indigenous News Network in Action: IndigenousX, The Guardian and the Wakul App
Un-braiding deficit discourse in Indigenous education news 2008–2018: Performance, attendance and mobility
This article presents a time sensitive critical text analysis of Australian news reporting that has identified, mapped and analysed news reporting about Indigenous education from 2008 to 2018. Three key themes were identified: school attendance; performance as measured by national testing, and boarding school education. A braiding metaphor is introduced to illustrate how the three themes operated independently over time, intersected and together …
Rural radio and the everyday politics of settlement on Indigenous land
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Country Hour radio programmes are produced regionally and promote specific understandings of rurality. This article presents an analysis that shows Indigenous people and issues are rarely sources or topics in Country Hour, and that stories about Indigenous land use are generally broadcast only if the land is used in a way that is seen as ‘productive’ through settler colonial eyes. It also argues the progr…
Sociology (44 works) · Political science (41 works) · Media studies (34 works) · Law (28 works) · Media Studies and Communication (24 works) · Politics (21 works) · Public relations (20 works) · Law (19 works) · Indigenous (17 works) · Journalism (15 works)