Our pillars
We’ve developed four pillars that drive the work of the Centre.
- Journalism Best Practice
- Regulation and Governance
- Business Models
- Knowledge Integrity
Our four themes reflect concerns that run across the disciplines of law, journalism and communication, with technology as a key contributor underpinning all our programs and projects.
Journalism Best Practice
Our first program covers a range of topics that affect journalists and publishers and the profession of journalism, including journalism education. It also addresses journalism’s contribution to informed public debate within democratic society, and how it interacts with audiences and citizens.
Some of the topics we explore:
- Journalism in the new economy/the future of work.
- Building trust in a disaggregated and distributed media landscape.
- Role of media literacy in building trust.
- Audiences and users as content producers.
- Factual content and fake news.
- Ethics in transition: standards, complaints and regulation.
- Automated and algorithmic news.
- Role of investigative journalism and public service media.
Regulation and Governance
Our second program draws on our expertise in law and regulation and links with the ethical obligations of journalists and with journalists’ concerns for media freedom.
Some of the topics we explore:
- Redesigning communications legislation for a converged environment.
- Charting and protecting media freedoms.
- Reconciling media freedoms and responsibilities.
- ‘Fair use’ of journalists’, publishers’ and users’ content.
Business Models
Our third program connects journalism and law with the business of media. We believe that the challenges facing the media today are unlikely to be solved by specialists working in one domain. We draw of the inter-disciplinary environment at UTS to work with our colleagues in the Business School to explore topics such as:
- Business models and income streams: beyond advertising and paywalls.
- Investing in localism.
- Experiences of other disrupted industries.
- Adapting regulation for effective competition.
Knowledge Integrity
CMT introduced this pillar in 2020 to reflect its growing involvement in research and industry practice in the area of Information Disorder. As the Asia Pacific Bureau of First Draft, we’ve initially followed First Draft’s lead in using the term ‘information disorder’ to cover misinformation, disinformation and malinformation. While each of these terms has a specific meaning, ‘information disorder’ is useful in covering the field and also in avoiding some of the complications associated with terms like ‘fake news’.
The contemporary crisis of Information Disorder and knowledge Integrity is linked to the increasingly important role of digital platforms in the news and information ecosystem. However, its causes and effects go beyond digital platforms to encompass traditional news media, political communication and the public sphere as a whole. For this reason, knowledge integrity requires interdisciplinary approaches if we hope to understand it and develop effective interventions to mitigate its harms.
Like our other research pillars, CMT’s work on knowledge integrity is strongly interdisciplinary, cutting across law, policy, communication and journalism, with technology as a key theme. We conduct both fundamental and applied research, developing sound theoretical frameworks based on empirical data to inform effective policy and industry interventions.
To complement our expertise in these areas, we collaborate with researchers from other faculties and institutes at UTS who work on aspects of information disorder, with several formally affiliated with CMT.
