The Digital News Report (DNR) for 2024 landed on Monday, with some mixed results for news media in Australia. While there was a small increase in the number of people who access news everyday – it’s just over half of all Australians – news avoidance remains high. And at 49% compared to 56%, it looks like social media might soon overtake TV as the most popular source of news.
The DNR is produced locally by the team at the News and Media Research Centre at the University of Canberra and is part of a series of such reports from around the world, led by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford.
Below, Chris and Gary explore some of this year’s findings. Chris looks at the use of short-form and long-form video as a source of news, while Gary looks at how interest in local news is holding up, particularly in regional areas. There are more concerning results around the low levels of willingness to pay for news, which the report authors describe as a ‘plateau’.
Also in this issue, Kieran reports on changes made to the Basic Online Safety Expectations that are administered by the eSafety Commissioner. There’s a connection here with the current review of the Online Safety Act. The Issues Paper seeks responses on several aspects of the current arrangements. It also asks some fundamental questions about how we regulate in this area, and whether there should be some far-reaching changes such as imposing on service providers an overall duty of care or obligation not to cause harm, similar to the approach in the UK.
CMT is currently working on a submission to the review of the Online Safety Act, and we’ll have more on that in the next issue of the newsletter. We’ll also have – out next week – our latest Double Take podcast in which I talk to Rita Jabri Markwell from Birchgrove Legal who has been leading the vilification action brought by the Australian Muslim Advocacy Network against X Corp (formerly Twitter). We mentioned in our last issue that AMAN had a win in the Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal (QCAT) when the Tribunal agreed with its claim that X Corp, a foreign corporation, could be brought before QCAT in relation to tweets posted in Queensland. AMAN says the tweets constitute hate speech and contravene the state’s vilification laws. This week, X Corp lodged an appeal against the decision of QCAT on jurisdiction, so it looks like there will be another step before the substantive claim of vilification is considered. We’ll post the podcast on our usual channels.
Finally, a big congratulations to Ayesha who has been selected as a Fellow at the Weizenbaum Institute under its Open Fellowship Program 2024. She’ll spend a month at the Institute in Berlin later this year, where she’ll conduct her research on refugee journalists in Germany and collaborate with the 'Digital News Dynamics' and 'Digitalization, Sustainability, and Participation' research groups.
Derek Wilding, CMT Co-Director