Our second report into the state of regional news media - and the impact it has on how much the rest of Australia gets to know of events outside our major cities - has been launched. You can read it here.
This year, we continued to survey metro print, radio and television to quantify how much regional news metro audiences were exposed to, and we found a declining level of coverage in 2022-23 compared to 2021-22. Each surveyed metro outlet published or broadcast fewer regional stories from fewer local government areas. There continued to be a significant focus on crime stories, particularly at News Corp’s Daily Telegraph, and we found that coverage of rural and regional Australia increased in metro news outlets during natural disasters, of which we've had a fair share in recent times.
We also researched whether the narratives that developed in regional news media around significant policy initiatives moved across to metro news media. Ayesha Jehangir examined how the various alcohol bans imposed on Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory were covered in regional and metro media, while Gary Dickson looked at coverage of the contentious Murray Darling Basin Plan. They both found little to no movement in narratives reported in regional media being picked up by metro media, and very little indication that regional media was performing the kind of investigative journalism around major policy issues that might be attractive for metro news media editors to run. This may indicate that local voices are being confined to their geographic boundaries, leaving them outside the mainstream debates that traditionally occur around policy initiatives.
In 2024 - the third year of our research, which is funded by the Vincent Fairfax Family Foundation - we'll look at models to increase the amount of regional news that metro audiences are exposed to.
Monica Attard, CMT Co-Director