This week News Corp’s Michael Miller has announced a cut of as many as 100 titles and hundreds of jobs in a bid to move to digital-only production to aid the financial security of the company, which has been suffering in the wake of lost advertising revenue. This is a great loss for communities where the local paper is often…
The media industry has been through enormous upheaval due to Covid-19, in part because it was underway before the virus. This recent SMH piece details the closures of multiple media mastheads in Australia. The signs are grim: the closure of AAP; the continuing diminishment of local news in regional areas and the lack of a sustainable funding model for public…
Columbia Journalism Review published an article titled ‘What needs to be done to help the media industry?’ which explores how the disintegration of the traditional financial model and the advent of the coronavirus have decimated media’s future, unless we collectively act to support it. The piece explores the possibility of treating news publishers as non-for-profit organisations, as well as increasing…
Reporters Without Borders (Reporters Sans Frontieres, RSF) have released their 2020 World Press Freedom Index, which calculates the global press freedom ranking of countries around the world. This year, due to the AFP raids in 2019, the lack of legislative protections for the function journalism plays in our democracy, and concentrated media ownership, Australia’s position has fallen from 21st to…
Sometimes it takes deeply shocking events to remind us why we need certain social institutions to work freely and effectively. We’re now not just having a pandemic, but we’ve also had a drought and a catastrophic bushfire season to underscore – in red ink – just how important it is to have a well-resourced and genuinely free media that does…
An ABC report yesterday stated that ‘Beijing announced… American journalists with press credentials expiring this year who work with the New York Times, the News Corp-owned Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post, would not be permitted to work in mainland China, Hong Kong or Macau… Beijing described its steps as “necessary and reciprocal countermeasures that China is compelled to…
China’s Communist Party (CCP) have been working hard to both control and stifle the spread of information via media and social media, during the Covid-19 crisis. So much so that two citizen journalists covering the outbreak from Wuhan, Chen Qiushi and Fang Bin, have been missing now for over a month. According to The NYTimes, however, China’s journalists are fighting…
AAP will shut down in June, as Nine and News Corp have decided to bring their investment in the publication to a halt, citing Google as the main reason for the erosion of AAP’s business. AAP’s 180 journalists provide the nation’s media with a large amount of their daily news and photos, and have been doing so since 1935. This…
Why we need a Media Freedom Act The ABC has made the decision not to appeal the Federal Court ruling that the AFP’s warrant to conduct a raid of the ABC’s Ultimo offices was valid. It has decided it can’t litigate its way to reforming fundamentally bad laws. This further stresses the need for a Media Freedom Act. “The principle…
The Federal Court recently ruled that the AFP raids on ABC offices in Ultimo were valid. The ABC have today announced they will not lodge an appeal. This decision is unsurprising, and comes as a result of the current legislative landscape. Once again, another sign we need a Media Freedom Act. ABC’s Managing Director, David Anderson, said “This outcome demonstrates…
The Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom is speaking to journalists and publishers in the Asia–Pacific to determine the impact the COVID-19 virus has had – and is having – on press freedom in the region.
Please help us gather this data by taking this short survey, and sharing it with other journalists, publishers and press freedom organisations, so that we can design effective and long-term regional solutions to support press freedom in the Asia–Pacific.