The evidence is in

The Australian Communications and Media Authority’s (ACMA) first Media Diversity Measurement Framework Report is out. It’s an impressive painting of the news media landscape, drawing on their own and other research to give a detailed picture of the producers, the content and the audience.

The Framework emerged from pre-COVID-19 reviews of media diversity and localism research and measurement schemes conducted by the CMT. ACMA shelved the program during the pandemic but dusted it off after the 2022 election when the new Labor government committed to “secure the evidence base” to inform its media policy reform.

Three years on and we have a sense of what that evidence base is.

The headline figures are familiar. Free-to-air TV is the most popular platform for accessing news, though social media is rising among 18-to-34-year-olds. Trust is highest at the public broadcasters but declining for the industry as a whole. The number of journalists in Australia fell by 19 per cent from 2011 to 2021.

ACMA also sets a baseline of around 2,900 professional news outlets across nine platforms as operating in November 2024.

A ‘news outlet’ in the Framework’s definition is akin to the distribution platform of a ‘news brand’: the Sydney Morning Herald (a news brand) consists of two news outlets: its newspaper and its website. This explains the difference between this number and that of the Public Interest Journalism Initiative (PIJI), which reported around 1,200 news outlets last December.

The report is full of caveats like this. The analysis is so reliant on external research – the news content chapter, for example, is entirely dependent on PIJI’s sampling project – that consistency in methodology is all but impossible. ACMA has done an admirable job of pulling together what data is out there, assessing its quality against their Framework, and incorporating it where possible, which is often a harder task than designing and collecting something specific to your own needs.

ACMA has flagged that as it looks toward the next report it will further develop its own research and collaborate more closely with academia and industry. This work will need to include both media market monitoring and content sampling, following on from the end of this research at PIJI last year.

The next report is not due until end 2026, though ACMA has promised updates to its interactive dashboards in the interim. Two years is a long time in the media industry. Having designed and conducted the PIJI research that ACMA relies on for much of this report, I’d observe it’s very difficult to retroactively collect this data. When things close, they tend to disappear from the Internet very quickly, and often without any fanfare. Data needs to be captured regularly if it is going to be captured at all.

The past five years have seen a lot of inquiries into the state of the news sector, mostly retreading the same ground. The Media Diversity Measurement Framework Report can hopefully be the last of these: it is as complete a statement about the Australian news market as has been produced. 

We have the evidence base – let’s get to reform.