Media Pluralism and Online News was a project undertaken from 2018 to 2024. It was funded by the Australian Research Council as a Discovery Project.
We set out to track the dynamic developments in the way news is produced and consumed online and to account for this in public policy designed to promote media pluralism. We looked at the transition in understandings of media pluralism by studying contemporary European policy approaches and a series of innovative news practices, including through making use of a big data approach to collecting media content.
One of the key outputs of the project was a classification tool and dashboard that allowed us to computationally evaluate aspects of media in a multi-platform news ecosystem. We used the concept of ‘public affairs content’ to separate out and identify the categories of content that contributes to media pluralism.
Among our policy recommendations was a proposal for the introduction of a public interest test for media mergers. It would assess whether a particular combination of media groups will benefit audiences in terms of the provision of public affairs content in the markets if the transaction were to proceed, and if not, the level of harm that could occur.
The classification tool, with suitable adaptation, could be used to inform the assessment of which media sources matter when assessing diversity or pluralism.
Our approach and our findings – along with chapters exploring aspects of media pluralism in South Korea, China, the Global South and Europe – are set out in the book from the project, Media Pluralism and Online News: The Consequences of Automated Curation for Society, published in September 2023 and available through Intellect.
Information on the tool is set out in the book and in our submission to the Australian Communications and Media Authority on ‘A New Framework for Measuring Media Diversity in Australia’. More information on the public interest test can be found in our submission to the inquiry of the Senate Standing Committees on Environment and Communications, ‘Media Diversity in Australia’. Both submissions are available from the CMT website.
Other material from the project is available from the archived project website.
The project also supported a doctoral scholarship, with the degree of PhD conferred by UTS on Tim Koskie for his thesis, Below the Line: Media Pluralism Through Comments on Public Affairs News Stories.
Researchers:
- Associate Professor Tim Dwyer, University of Sydney
- Professor Derek Wilding, University of Technology Sydney
- Dr Jonathan Hutchinson, University of Sydney
- Professor Saba Bebawi, University of Technology Sydney
- Professor Kari Karppinen, University of Helsinki