After three years of research into whether the decline of regional news has impacted audiences in metropolitan locations as well as those in regional Australia, this week we are publishing our final report. You can read it here.
Funded by the Vincent Fairfax Family Foundation, we were able to help Guardian Australia experiment with a ‘hub and spoke’ model to establish a Rural Reporting Network. At the centre of this model is a rural editor, and over the past three years it has been supported by five UTS journalism graduates posted to different regional locations, and a team of freelance contributing journalists. The reporting network will continue, despite the end of funding and, for the moment at least, of our research.
In our 3rd report we have gone global in search of answers to how best to provide regional media with the resources it needs to produce quality public interest journalism, and, with that journalism, to establish links to metropolitan media, so that all Australians have a sense of what the significant issues facing regional dwellers are and how they can best be tackled by policy-makers.
We are also publishing the results of our final surveys measuring the flow of regional news to metropolitan markets. A spoiler – the news isn’t good. Over the three years of our research, we have identified a steady decline in the production of regional local news by metropolitan news outlets – in the number of stories, the types of issues covered, and where coverage is occurring.
In this final year of research, we also conducted a number of focus groups in both regional NSW and in Sydney to see what people most valued in the news media available to them. Again, the findings are sobering: regional audiences were dismissive of metro news outlets’ efforts to cover local issues unless they perceived the reportage to be derived from a connection to community, usually through the physical presence of a journalist. Metropolitan audiences reported being uninterested in regional stories unless they concerned national narratives directly relevant to them, such as energy production.
You can find all three reports on our site. Our thanks to the VFFF for their support, and to Guardian Australia. And finally, our congratulations to the students who won positions at Guardian Australia and contributed their reflections on regional media to our reports.
Monica Attard, CMT Co-Director