Abstract
Using a creative ecosystems approach, this paper demonstrates that journalism is deeply embedded in the interconnected ecosystem of publishing and, at a higher level, the creative industries. Analysis of data from seven regional areas in New South Wales and Victoria revealed that newsrooms and journalists are vertically integrated with national and international journalistic practices and economic imperatives and also horizontally integrated with other sectors in the creative industries. The analysis revealed a scalable yet integrated ecosystem at work with complex and interconnected journalistic practices on display. This view moves beyond the usual normative approach to studying journalism. We are not asserting that journalists should be doing certain things, as important as that is, but drawing attention to the fact that using this lens allows us a different and useful perspective on what they are actually doing.
Introduction
Over the last decade, the publishing industry has experienced deep change and the profession of journalism, in particular, has felt the effect. Several events have occurred in journalism that have led to a perfect storm for profound change: market saturation, diminished audiences, ineffective business models, increased competition and changes in technology (Picard, 2014). Regional and rural newspapers in Australia have not been immune. While Hess (2019) states that there are regional centres that have been less affected, the economic havoc that has been wrought on the big media has meant there are few publishing organisations that have emerged unscathed. This includes regional news organisations, where a local newspaper tends to have deep connections with its community (Hess and Bowd, 2015; Hess and Waller, 2020), while also being vertically integrated with the broader regional, national and international levels of the industry where journalistic practices at the micro scale and economic imperatives at the meso and macro scale align (Comunian, 2019). As part of a creative ecosystem (McIntyre et al., 2019), journalism is both constrained and enabled at these macro, meso and micro levels of the ecosystem, exhibiting a set of complex interrelated dynamics at work across the whole system. As our research objective, we set out to explore this ecosystem to reveal, firstly, how regional newspapers occupy a place in a broader publishing ecosystem and, secondly, how changes in newspaper business structures affect the creative practices of professional journalists and the expectations for journalists working regionally in NSW and Victoria.
Drawing on mixed methods data gathered in 2019–2020 for an Australian Research Council (ARC) grant (Cunningham et al., 2021), focused on creative industries’ (CI) hotspots in regional Australia, we examined, in part, the decline and continuation of journalism across seven regional areas in Australia: Albury, Wollongong and Coffs Harbour in New South Wales and Wodonga, Ballarat, Bendigo and Geelong in Victoria. In the first instance, we drew on Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) census and economic data from 2011 to 2020, which allowed us to, among other things, track a significant decline in the publishing sector. Following this, we attempted to go deeper and personalise this de-identified statistical data using primarily qualitative ethnographic methods to capture, through key informant interviews and fieldwork observations in each regional location, and document the experiences and creative practices of journalists who have survived the disruptions occurring at a local, national and international level. In positioning journalism as a profession that exists within a vertically scaled system, we also introduced the idea that the ecosystem journalists exist in can also be scaled horizontally. Journalistic skills, like writing and accurate research, are valued and transferrable attributes for other CI sectors and non-CI industries that sit alongside publishing. We thus take the view that the CI is a scalable and integrated ecosystem where nested sub-sectors are complex and interconnected. It is the creative practitioner, in this case the journalist, who brings dynamic skills to that ecosystem, operating on a range of levels. Using journalism as an example, the research identifies how journalists operate within this ecosystem, at the micro (ideas, practices and content creation), meso (institutions, networks and collaborations) and macro (national and international structures and dynamics that help determine many actions) levels as part of a scalable creative system.
Background
Creative industries
The CI are defined as those industries that, according to Davies and Sigthorsson, ‘require some input of human creativity; second, they are vehicles for symbolic messages, that is, they are carriers of meaning; and third, they contain, at least potentially, some intellectual property that belongs to an individual or group’ (2013: 1). The efficacy and veracity of this definition have been examined more fully in McIntyre et al. (2023), but it is one we accept here for our operational purposes. Supporting this operational definition are others. Creativity is now considered by most researchers around the globe publishing in creativity studies to be the bringing into being of novel things that are valued in at least one social setting (Hennessey and Amabile, 2010; Hennessey, 2017). Creative practice is therefore the practice of bringing novel things into being that are valued in at least one social setting. This applies to the creation of news and the work that journalists engage in on a daily basis as practitioners in the CI. As journalist Davis Hardaker notes: For a journalist, there is nothing more daunting – or exciting – than the blank page. It is the moment when you can make something that has true impact… or not, depending on how your brain engages at that moment. Working on The Politics is a little like this moment of creation, writ large… there's one thing that hasn’t changed when it comes to the media: good journalism depends on financial support and financial support begets good journalism. (Hardaker, 2024)
While there are several ways to view the CI (see, for example, Flew, 2012), this research draws on Cunningham and Higgs’ (2009) Creative Trident to conceptualise it. This typology employs two overarching categories of Creative Services and Cultural Production. Cultural Production includes ‘film, television and radio, music and performing arts, publishing and visual arts’ (QUT, 2020a), while Creative Services include ‘advertising and marketing, architecture and design, and software and digital content’ (QUT, 2020a). In Australia, the Creative Service sector employs 74% of Australia's creative workforce with the remaining workers employed in Cultural Production (QUT, 2020a). To assist with the tabulation of national employment figures, the Creative Trident further categorises CI employees under three modes: specialist, embedded and support workers (Higgs and Lennon, 2014).
For example, a journalist is considered, in the first instance, to be working in a ‘specialist’ occupation, employed as a creative worker in the publishing sector of Cultural Production. A journalist could also be employed as an embedded creative, using the same creative skillset but embedded in another industry sector as, for example, employed for an online publication in the heavy vehicle industry. Support workers are those people employed in the CI but not performing a so-called creative role (Cunningham and Higgs, 2009: 192); newspaper employees who perform advertising roles, sales, management, accounting or administration would be considered support workers. These roles are necessary for news publications to function effectively, providing journalists with the ability to also action their role as creative specialists.
Journalism is located as a sub-sector of publishing, situating it as a profession within the industry of newspaper, periodical, book and directory publishing, where the occupation of print journalist is located, according to the ANZSIC and ANZCSO classifications, alongside an author, writer (including technical) and editor (newspapers, periodicals, books or script). These ANZSIC and ANZCSO classifications have been used to help organise large sets of employment data to retrospectively trace growth and decline inside the CI sub-sectors. Such an assessment for this project was conducted using the 2011 and 2016 Australian Census statistics for the publishing sector, and it was found that ‘[t]he mean income in publishing is growing at about half the rate of that of the total workforce, while positions in the sub-sector fell at a faster rate than in any other CI category’ (QUT, 2020a: 3). This finding supports other literature in the field that recognises the difficulties occurring in the publishing industry. By isolating the profession of journalism, we aim to discuss how it is vertically integrated as a necessary part of the publishing ecosystem, even though employment in the sector has been in decline. We also point out how the skills of a journalist are horizontally integrated as creative specialists in other CI sectors, for example, the sectors of radio, television and advertising, as well as embedded creatives where journalistic skills are usefully employed in the broader economy.
Creative ecosystems in action
To achieve this aim, we adopt a creative systems approach (Csikszentmihalyi, 2014) which allows for complex dynamic and scaled interactive patterns to be revealed. The model conceptualises the idea that creative systems in action are fluid, open, dynamic and spatiotemporally dependent, as most active systems are. It must: include a structured knowledge system manifest in all the collected works pertinent to that symbol system. This is called a domain. It also consists of a field, that is, a structured social organization that operates using domain knowledge in a process of coopetition. This field is populated by all those who can act upon and effect the symbol system, that is, those with varying expertise including other producers, gatekeepers, cultural intermediaries and audiences. The third subsystem we will call an agent. This agent is an active choice making entity which may be scaled outward from individuals to dyads, groups and other collective entities such as institutions who make “changes to the stored information that pre-exists them” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1988: 329). These agents necessarily have a unique but shared background and bring their distinctive characteristics to bear on the entire system. (McIntyre and Thompson, 2021: 9)
Explaining the complexities and relationships between the meso, micro and macro levels is ‘a powerful way to explore where demand and product creation meet and how demand and consumption create and shape markets globally’ (Potts 2011 in Comunian, 2019: 48). The macro view of the creative system is focused on growth of markets at the national and international levels and the development of localised clusters and global production networks and the ‘role played by network structures and place-based interconnections’ (Comunian, 2019: 47). The meso level is about operations of CI institutions and organisations, in our case in the regions, while the micro level of the system is about the practices engaged in by professional practitioners (Comunian, 2019: 39–40). In exploring these ideas, we faced a challenge in representing the detail of the field, the structured social organization populated by all those who could affect the domain, after realising that the statistics we acquired for the ABS census data did not have a precise correlation to what we were seeing in our ethnographic data. As a direct result, we drew up the following model (see Figure 1) to indicate what was derived from the statistical analysis and what was added to it via the ethnographic work. It became one way to conceive of the field as it operates within the broader systems model.
The creative system, or ecosystem, at work, initially published in Creativity and Cultural Production in the Hunter Final Report (2019).
The introduction of this creative system (ecosystem) in action figure allowed us as researchers to examine one creative profession, that of journalism, and link this representation of the field to the broader systems model and see the effects of it at scale. To our knowledge, no one has yet observed regional journalism as part of the CI using this specific model apart from ourselves. Its use is significant as it places journalism inside a system of action which reveals the fact that the structures of this system ‘enable and constrain at one and the same time. They provide the conditions which give rise to the possibility of action, decision-making and choice-making that is the hallmark of creativity’ (McIntyre et al., 2024: 47).
Literature review
While other sectors of the CI receive government subsidies and other support (see, for example, Kerrigan et al., 2020), the publishing industry, seen here in the example of journalism, is typically self-funding and is generally owned privately or via a publicly listed company. There are some notable exceptions, for example, The New Daily, an online publication funded by Australian industry superannuation funds, philanthropic organisation The Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas and publicly funded organisations such as Australia's ABC. The point is that the majority of news organisations have historically used advertising and classified advertising as their main income source. However, and as noted elsewhere (Carson, 2019; Tiffen, 2010), there has been a marked decline in not only circulation but also advertising and those ‘rivers of gold’, the classified advertising that subsidised journalism over many years. In 1964, Marshall McLuhan famously predicted the demise of newspapers: ‘The classified ads (and stock-market quotations) are the bedrock of the press. Should an alternative source of easy access to such diverse daily information be found, the press will fold’ (1964: 207). That alternative is social media and the Internet, with Google, Facebook and YouTube now commanding more than 80% of the digital advertising market (Meade, 2020b). As Hess noted, this advertising revenue has ‘gushed’ (2019, n.p.) towards online platforms. This change in the way advertising revenue is directed lies at the heart of the meso and macro adjustments affecting the journalism ecosystem and certainly the daily practices, at the micro level, of journalists.
To counteract declining income and increasing expenditure, news organisations have taken such measures as outsourcing, using integrated newsrooms, sharing resources, an increasing reliance on digital platforms and making significant staff changes, in the form of redundancies and replacing experienced staff with younger, cheaper workers. Furthermore, the introduction of paywalls, subscriptions, premium content, cross-subsidisation and sponsorship are examples of how news is attempting to survive financially (for more discussion on different payment models, see Benson, 2019; Hesmondhalgh, 2019; Olsen et al., 2021).
While a change in the way income is derived is one of the concerns in the news industry, on a macro level, it is social and digital media that has changed how journalism is practiced at the micro level. The expectations of journalism are now to see their daily activity as a converged practice with audio, video and text all part of a journalist's toolkit which are then used to aid publishing on multiple platforms including social media, online and print (Cohen, 2019; Hesmondhalgh, 2019). Comor and Compton (2015), after surveying Canadian journalists on how technology has affected their work and workload, cited one journalist who said ‘“[i]t has completely changed the nature of every element of what I do”’ (2016: 76). However, in regard to regional and rural newspapers, it has been noted that, while digital is increasingly important, the print version of a publication is still a crucial part of the community (Hess and Waller, 2020).
Other changes in practice include the increasing expectation of social media use by journalists in sourcing and dissemination of stories and for an increased interaction with their news sources and the audience. For more than a decade, hundreds of studies have been conducted on journalism and social media and how journalists use social media in their practice (for a review of social media research in journalism practice, see Lewis and Molyneux, 2018). Nevertheless, Hess and Waller (2020) claim that the changes in technology that are seemingly inevitable demonstrate a technologically deterministic approach to journalism's future, one that needs to be tempered with equal weight given to digital, social, cultural, political, economic and environmental concerns. Comor and Compton call this emphasis ‘technological fetishism’ (2015: 74) and observe that while journalists may be empowered by their use of technology, they may also feel disempowered.
Methodology
The principal methodological framework for the project was ethnography employing both qualitative and quantitative forms of CI data collection. The quantitative data offer a statistical snapshot of the economic performance across the CI, from which we then extracted specific datasets on the publishing industry and journalistic occupations as listed in the ANZSIC and ANZCSO classifications. The data were gathered across two Australian states in 2019–2020. Overall, we examined 17 geographically strategic regions across the country where employment, business activities and state and local policies contributed to a sustained and active creative economy. A research team from the University of Newcastle collected the data for the NSW and Victorian regions, which were selected with assistance from the research partner organisations Create NSW and Create Victoria.
Quantitative data were extracted from the ABS Census of Housing and Population for 2011 and 2016. The population data were organised by place of work and place of residence and also drew on the Australian Business Register and IP Australia registration data (QUT, 2020b). By pooling this quantitative data, it was possible to compare publishing activities across seven regional locations from two census collections, which gives an indication of the publishing sector's growth and/or decline. The ABS census counts all employees who earn a primary income, and those data classify each worker against an industry classification (ANZSIC) and an occupation (ANZSCO).
1
This helps determine an exact number of workers in the publishing sector of the CI, including print journalism. ANZSIC (Industry Classification) 5410 Newspaper, Periodical, Book and Directory Publishing 5411 Newspaper Publishing 5412 Magazine and Other Periodical Publishing ANZCO (Occupations) 212200 Authors, and Book and Script Editors, nfd 212211 Author 212212 Book or Script Editor 212412 Newspaper or Periodical Editor 212413 Print Journalist 212415 Technical Writer 212499 Journalists and Other Writers, nfd
The employed persons data, appearing under these codes from both census collections, were statistically analysed against the creative trident methodology. The census data drew on employment figures by four-digit ANZSIC and ANZSCO categories, making it harder to access specific employment figures for journalism, although it provides an indication of the decline in the sector that journalism sits in. It should be noted that regional employment figures can be quite low, so the ABS applies a confidentialisation algorithm to protect identities, and this could mean that sometimes the figures provided may be an underestimate (QUT, 2020a).
The qualitative methods we used sit under the ethnographic banner and include in-depth interviews with key informants, desktop searches and extended observations in the regional cities. Ethics approval was granted from Queensland University of Technology, the lead institution on the project. The interviews were carried out in 2019 (see Table 1). There was at least one journalist interviewed in each city under the publishing sector. To broaden the narrowly focused descriptors from the ANZCO census occupations and accurately reflect employment in the publishing and journalism sectors, the field work drew on another list of publishing sector occupational titles found in books, magazines and the press, which was created based on desktop research. This list of occupations helped the researchers to recruit interview participants in the publishing sector in each region. For the purpose of this paper, those who identify as journalists were included in the qualitative data for analysis. There were six other research participants whose work horizontally connected to journalism, although they were not earning a primary income in the publishing sector. They were employed as television journalists and professional writers which are categorised under the Television and Radio CI sectors.
Publishing interviewee participants.
Discussion
This discussion section demonstrates, firstly, how the publishing sector of the CI has declined by drawing on our statistical analysis. It then provides a brief summary of the areas that make up this research and examines how the journalists working in the publishing industries in these areas have managed digital change.
Creative economic employment data for publishing
National level analysis of the publishing employment data, representing in part the macro view, showed that between 2011 and 2016, there were nearly 400 positions lost each year, showing an annual decline of −1.2% positions for the sector (QUT, 2020a: 3). When assessed by CI sectors, publishing had the greatest employment decline, followed by visual arts (−0.6%), whereas the largest growth was in advertising and marketing (4.7%), followed by software and digital content (3.2%). The mean income in the publishing sector in 2016 was $66,000 showing a growth of 0.3% (QUT, 2020a: 3).
A more focused analysis of the employment levels at the meso level for these regional areas showed a total publishing workforce of 2071 across the locations of Albury, Ballarat, Bellingen, Coffs Harbour, Greater Bendigo, Greater Geelong, Surf Coast, Wodonga and Wollongong for 2016. This indicates an overall decline of −4.27% with 904 creative specialists and embedded creatives employed in occupations across these regions (see Table 2). When tabulated by industry, it showed 378 specialist employees were working in publishing with 526 embedded in other industries. There were significantly more support workers than specialists employed in both the publishing and other industries. 2 This means the overall number of journalists employed in the publishing sector was less than those workers supporting the journalists. The emerging employment trend shows that for publishing occupations, there are more employees in non-CI, working as embedded creatives, than those employed as specialists or support workers in the CI. This points to a significant change in terms of horizontal integration in the publishing sector.
NSW and Victoria publishing 2016 census data by place of work.
While this meso level view of the publishing employment dynamics confirms a sharp decline across census collection years, to see how the workforce decline was experienced at the micro level, that is through the eyes of regional print journalists, we turn to the ethnographic fieldwork.
At least one journalist was interviewed in each of the noted hotspots. Those interviews included an exploration of the CI in the area but also involved discussions around the state of journalism, the direction of the individual publication and how the journalists themselves work in a changing environment. These brief reflections recognise the relationship between the macro-, meso- and micro-structures of journalism and demonstrate the deep connections between what is going on in the broader culture and the individuals in the system. The following sections discuss how the journalists in specific regions have adapted their practice to accommodate the newer platforms and also how digital tools have constrained and enabled their practice. And, as is common in qualitative interviews, different participants reflected on different aspects of journalism with some placing more emphasis on practice, others on platforms and others on the industry.
Each of the regional hotspot sections below include a brief discussion of the region; to help explain the macro view, the statistics on employment in the CI presents a meso view, with the publishing sector presenting the micro view where journalism is practiced. This information is included to give a broad context to the macro level dynamics of the CI in each location because macro-structures frequently reflect complex global trends where consumption creates and shapes markets globally and locally (Comunian, 2019: 47). After this brief macro level description, we delve back into the meso and micro level reflections of those who work in journalism.
Albury-Wodonga
Albury-Wodonga is situated on the land of the Wiradjuri people. These twin towns sit on the Murray River with Albury in New South Wales and Wodonga in Victoria and have a combined population of 95,500 (REMPLAN, 2019). In Albury-Wodonga there are 1113 ‘creatives’ in total with the most in architecture and design (192) and software and digital content (182). The general trend seen at the macro level for publishing is that business registrations and employment are stable, but total earnings have fallen. However, for journalism, as one part of the publishing industry, the meso level statistics tell a different story. The employment figure in this sector has declined by 9.1%. Several factors have led to the downturn of the journalism profession in Albury-Wodonga including ownership changes, declining readership and a loss of advertising, worsened by moving online and competing with other online news sources such as those found on Facebook. In Albury-Wodonga, The Border Mail was included in the research as part of the publishing industry.
In the last 15 years, The Border Mail has changed from being an independent paper, owned by the Mott family for more than a century, to being part of the Fairfax stable of newspapers in 2006, then absorbed into Nine during their merger in 2018 with Fairfax and, finally, purchased by privately owned Australian Community Media (ACM) in 2019. These meso changes reflect the macro level of turmoil in the news industry. At the time of the research, the publication had 278,000 monthly readers across digital and print and published from Monday to Saturday (ACM, 2019) and, at the time of publication, 231,651 digital readers and 76,625 readers per month of the print edition (ACM, 2021b).
Interviews reveal the effects that are occurring at the micro level of the system. Ellen Ebsary joined The Border Mail in 2015 and, at the time of the interview, had worked 3 years as a journalist. Ebsary classifies herself as a generalist reporter who does ‘bits of everything’ (iv, 23 May 2019) and came into the paper after the brutal rounds of redundancies carried out by Fairfax (Zion et al., 2016). As an early career journalist, Ebsary has little experience of a newsroom where employees did one job and there was little multi-skilling: I don't think I've ever written a story just for the print product since I started, so it's definitely, it's considered of more value these days, the web and the digital version. (iv, 23 May 2019)
Ballarat
Ballarat is the third largest city in Victoria and is situated on the land of the Wathaurong people. In 2019, its population was 109,505 (.idcommunity 2020), and the CI are an important part of the Ballarat economy; in 2019, UNESCO declared it a City of Crafts and Folk Art. At the last census, which describes the effect of the macro-structures, at the meso level of employment there were 2137 ‘creatives’ employed in both the Creative Services and Cultural Production sub-sectors, with (as was evident across all the hotspots) creative services the highest employment sector and rapidly growing.
In regard to employment in publishing, analysis of meso level data showed that Ballarat went against the trend of other hotspots. While there was a decrease in employment, there was a significant increase in mean income, thus demonstrating that while the employment trend followed journalism's trajectory in other parts of the world, the income of those remaining increased. However, it is clear from the interviews with Ballarat's journalism participants that the downturn in revenue has impacted the industry.
Local journalists working in Ballarat described the effect of these macro and meso level indicators on their creative work. Caleb Cluff who is an investigative reporter at The Courier newspaper and Brett Macdonald, the last general manager of The Courier with a strong media background in radio and print, are both veterans of the news industry. Macdonald noted how the issues with journalism's business model and its reliance on advertising have meant a change in how news is reported: ‘community is crying out for solid journalism and people that can ask the difficult questions [but] it doesn’t happen anymore. And it's simply because I don’t believe there's the resources to do it anymore’ (Macdonald iv, 27 June 2019). Macdonald also noted how difficult it has been to monetise digital assets and how this process has taken years and is still an ongoing process. Both McDonald and Cluff lamented the difficulties with the business model and its effect on the local newspaper, particularly on the ‘ability to employ good journalists’ (Macdonald iv, 27 June 2019). Mass redundancies have played out in the regions with a loss of experience: ‘those people are all gone [and] we tend to have to rely on a lot of younger journalists coming out of university … who are enthusiastic and have energy, but don’t have a lot of experience’ (Cluff iv, 26 June 2019).
And, in line with other ACM publications, The Courier is currently offered as a print and digital publication with 60,307 readers of the print edition per month and 272,739 viewing the digital offering (ACM, 2021c).
Bendigo
The traditional owners of Bendigo are the Dja Dja Wurrung people. Bendigo is a Victorian town and is famous for its birth during the Victorian gold rush in the 1850s. Its population in 2020 was 110,000, and, in 2016, 1573 people worked in the CI sector. A macro analysis through the Australian census showed that Bendigo's publishing industries fell in employment, earnings and income, including journalism. This is not surprising. As noted in other hotspots, this trend is a reflection of the ongoing decline in revenue for this sector.
There were two major newspapers in Bendigo at the time of the interviews, showing the meso level of activity: The Bendigo Weekly, a free locally owned paper that started servicing Bendigo in 1997, and the Bendigo Advertiser, established in 1852 and owned by ACM. In 2019, The Advertiser and Weekly merged under the banner of ACM. Peter Kennedy, managing editor of the Weekly, and Natalie Croxon, a journalist from The Advertiser, were interviewed about their reflections on technology, production processes and their practice. Their experiences of resources, platforms and practice reflect the different ownership structures and illustrate how macro, meso and micro converge inside a creative system.
The Weekly has a print and online approach to publishing, using online platform Issuu.com to house pdf copies of the printed version (Hess and Waller 2020). According to research by Hess and Waller (2020), the Weekly frequently used social media to link to stories; however, Kennedy noted that it is difficult to maintain an online presence because of the scale of the publication: We'll do an occasional Facebook thing and if there's a community service value in something, say a frost warning or whatever else. That's the sort of stuff you'll see roll through our Facebook page … but it doesn't do as much good as it can do and it's too easy for it to do harm. We're not resourced in this day and age to monitor it and maintain it to the extent of, say the Bendigo Addie [the Bendigo Advertiser] in town. You need scale to compete in the digital age. We don't have that. What we do in print, I think we do pretty well. (iv 24 June 2019)
Natalie Croxon, as a journalist at the Bendigo Advertiser, has a different experience. As part of the ACM group, there are more resources and more shared resources. For example, the design team is rotated between ACM mastheads. The Advertiser is also one of the publications that is focused on digital first but also attempting to get subscribers to pay for the online content. This change in focus has led to a change in how audience engagement is measured: ‘our focus was once sort of more on numbers of people coming to the site, and now it's more about their engagement once they're there’ (Croxon i/v 24 June 2019). An examination of any of the ACM's AdCentre webpages, where advertisers can find audience statistics, demonstrates Croxon's contention. For example, in 2021, The Advertiser's Digital Audience statistics include 326,382 ‘Unique Audience’ numbers, 1,809,538 ‘Page Views’ and 00:04:47 ‘Time Per Person (HH:MM:SS)’ (ACM, 2021a), thus demonstrating to advertisers that The Advertiser is an attractive option where the audience engages with content. These interviewee responses show how meso structures affect the production of news content and how it reaches audiences.
In regard to micro level practice, journalists at The Advertiser are expected to take their own photos, although photographers are ‘saved for busy days, they're saved for the more premium shots’ (Croxon iv 24 June 2019), upload their own stories on social media and interact with the audience on Facebook. The publication has a Twitter account that has an updated feed, a Facebook account and Instagram, which the photographers update.
An interesting observation from Croxon is the international engagement that occurs during big events in the town. The inclusion of social media such as a Facebook Livefeed means that: ‘Local news audiences are no longer confined to a specific geographic locality that provides boundaries within which to build “community”’ (Hess and Bowd, 2015: 23). While Hess and Bowd's. (2015) research discovered that it may be difficult for a local newspaper to build a community online, The Advertiser found that those with connections to the area kept up with what is going on in the town via social media: We'll do a lot of things through Facebook and say at Easter, and Bendigo has its huge Easter festival. We'll livestream the parades and different things and we always have people saying like, “Thank you. We're watching from wherever in the US”. (iv 24 June 2019)
Coffs Harbour
Coffs Harbour is situated on the lands of the Gumbaynggirr people on the mid-north coast of New South Wales. The population of Coffs Harbour (in 2019) was 77,277, and those employed in the CI from the 2016 census were 795, a growth of 1.9% from the 2011 census. However, at the macro level the publishing industry has showed significant decline although it did have the highest mean income in the CI sector.
At the meso level, the local Coffs newspaper in 2019 was The Coffs Coast Advocate, owned by News Corp Australia. While it still is the local paper, in 2021, it was brought under the banner of Sydney's Daily Telegraph. The Advocate still publishes local news but also provides subscribers access to content from the Daily Telegraph. Matt Deans was the editor at the time and commented on the difficulty of maintaining a viable news service and how the business model adapted to counteract the threat of job losses: We were the first non-daily out of the major Australian media companies to introduce premium news as the paid service. And that's basically to safeguard the future of the business … premium news has been a way that we can safeguard journalists’ jobs in our newsrooms. It has been a bit of a challenge, let's say, but it's basically what we're seeing with media right across Australia. (Deans iv, 29 August 2019)
Another part of the adaption to digital news at the Advocate was the change from a daily paper, with up to 20 staff in the newsroom and a free paper on Wednesday and Saturday delivered to their readers, to a bi-weekly free version of the paper, supported by the premium online subscription service.
Geelong
Geelong is situated on the land of the Wathaurong people. In 2020, the Geelong area had a population of 324,067 and the CI employed 4386 people (in 2016). Workers in the CI have increased 6.25% each year since 2011, partially due to the installation of infrastructure such as the NBN and partially because of the high amount of investment made by the Victorian government in the CI. In a similar move to Ballarat, UNESCO has declared Geelong a creative city. These macro level structures afford more activity in publishing and journalism than the other sites examined in this study.
At the meso level, there is The Geelong Advertiser owned by News Corp Australia. It is the second oldest newspaper in Australia. David Cairns is its business editor, and he has been a journalist for over 30 years, primarily in regional Victoria, and has had various roles, starting as a graduate cadet, including chief subeditor, night editor and digital editor as well as editing his own newspaper. As part of News Corp, the newspaper has had some services centralised, like the IT infrastructure and website infrastructure, and others internationalised, for example, news assets, social media content verification and access to News Corp arms such as Fox: ‘News has always tried to find those vertically integrated sort of elements’ (Cairns iv, 17 June 2019). However, there is still a strong local flavour in the form of advertisers: there's certainly national brands and even if those national brands have local outlets, they get serviced by News nationally, not through here … And then we have local advertisers with local representation which is here. And whether that's direct or, again, via a local agency, we have ad reps on the ground to represent us. (Cairns iv, 17 June 2019) There's been multiple platforms, you know. So yes, there was a website and the social and now there's a bit more video and you know, perhaps some podcasts. And so the delivery channels have changed as everyone's consumption has changed and we've tried to be part of that and we still produce the traditional newspaper. (Cairns iv, 17 June 2019)
Wollongong
Wollongong sits on the ancestral lands of the Dharawal people. Wollongong's population sat at 216,000 in 2020 and, according to the 2016 census data, 3624 people were employed in the CI sector. In a similar way to other regions discussed here, the publishing industry dropped in employment but mean incomes increased, demonstrating again the changes happening in publishing industries at the macro level, particularly journalism. The publishing industry lost around 13.8% of employees per annum and employment in occupations under the publishing occupation code dropped by 2.8% between the 2011 and 2016 censuses. As part of the ARC project, the Illawarra Mercury represented the industry and the profession of journalism at the meso level.
The Illawarra Mercury is also part of the ACM stable of publications and is one of the oldest Australian newspapers. The print publication is produced 6 days a week with a monthly readership of 129,035 and another 374,347 per month accessing the digital version (ACM, 2021d). Desiree Savage, a journalist who has worked at the Illawarra Mercury since 2015, provides a micro level experience of the creative system. Savage's digital skills were well honed because of her experience with radio and ‘creating multimedia stuff for the web’ (iv, 16 April 2019). However, she did note that when she first started at the Illawarra Mercury there was some resistance to moving to digital tools: ‘when I started here I was like, wow, it's so behind with technology, and then they went to digital, which, to the much complaint of many people, but the people that have stayed have embraced it’ (iv 16 April 2019).
One of Savage's reflections about practice included a change in newsroom structure. In 2012–2013, Fairfax (the owner of the Mercury at the time) sent sub-editing positions off-shore to New Zealand (Hope and Myllylahti, 2013) in a bid to save money. The change in macro level events which led to change in meso institutional level practices effected how stories were managed at the micro level, as Savage explains: We do our own subbing … we had, like, three sub-editors that would work every night, and basically people would just write on a page and send it, and they wouldn't check. They'd have someone else checking, then another check, and this and that. So they'd actually go through different levels before they made it to the paper, but now it's like, no, no, you need to make sure … there's no one re-writing your work, like there used to be before. (iv 24 June 2019) You need to be skilled in all sorts now. So, when journalists are going through [university], you probably know this, they teach them all the different skills. It's not like when I went to Uni. It was like, okay, you can choose what stream. Would you like to be a broadcast journalist? Would you like to be print? Where it's like, no, no, you need to know everything now. (iv 16 April 2019)
Conclusion
This analysis of journalism as part of the publishing sector has revealed the effects of global, macro level trends occurring at a regional level in Australian journalism. These macro level dynamics have significantly affected the practices of a journalist at the meso and micro levels. The study's aims were to reveal a broad creative system at work and explore how regional newspapers occupy a place in a larger publishing ecosystem and how changes in newspaper business structures and processes affect journalistic practices now taking place. At the same time we wanted to know how the expectations on journalists have been affected by the macro changes in the industry including the introduction of newer platforms and the associated revenue decline these brought. Each participant reflected on changing practices, platforms and revenues, which are deeply connected at the macro level to the systemic changes in the publishing industry, manifested in merged newspapers, adjustments in circulation schedules and ownership changes.
At this meso level, each regional area in the study had a print newspaper servicing the city and its region. Every paper had recently been sold to a larger corporation, merged with another masthead, or incorporated into an urban title resulting in changes to the newspaper business models. These changes incurred job losses for journalists and support workers and were significant and visible in the publishing industries employment statistics with the largest decline across the Australia CI sub-sectors from 2011 to 2016. Interestingly, the average incomes of these journalists did stabilise. Concerns were raised, however, about how the decrease in revenue has affected the quality of news reporting in regional areas. In an effort to save money, senior journalists, with years of experience and contacts, are being replaced by cheaper, less-experienced journalists. A digital first strategy has led to changes in delivery schedules including a reduction in hard copy newspapers.
Local papers owned by larger media businesses are endorsing digital first but also attempting to get subscribers to pay for the online content; this has affected the style of reporting and thus journalistic practices at the micro level of the system. The tools a journalist use have changed, and journalists are expected to be digitally and multi-skilled. It is clear that accurate and quality news reporting is still valued by practicing journalists, but the business structures are forcing them to also be highly skilled digital practitioners where photography, podcasts, video and online content are part of daily journalistic practice.
Platforms such as social networking sites are playing a key role in news delivery, although at different levels, again depending on the publication and its ownership structure and business model. Some use Facebook Live for breaking news, while some have tried publishing video content online for feature articles. One of the smallest independent newspapers does not favour social media nor online first strategies. Facebook engagement is regarded as a community service, while the print publication is given journalistic priority. A journalist's relationship to printed news has changed significantly with digital delivery superseding the hardcopy in many instances. It's not surprising to see how the vertical integration of digital skills have become essential for a print journalist's skill set.
The impacts of vertical and horizontal integration were raised by the research participants, who were all practicing journalists. Examples of horizontal integration and how journalistic skills are being leveraged across other creative sectors were evident in the interviews with Savage (Illawarra) and Macdonald (Ballarat). Savage brought radio and multimedia skills to the Illawarra Mercury newsroom. Macdonald has worked in radio, print and advertising and applied his knowledge to community events such as eisteddfods and theatre. The statistical data also revealed more horizontal integration trends within the publishing occupations embedded in other CI sub-sectors, suggesting that journalistic skills are increasingly in demand across the broader economy.
Journalism and regional newspapers continue to occupy a place in a publishing ecosystem within an overarching CI ecosystem. Regional print journalists have been able to survive a critical period of global and national disruption because the profession is vertically integrated at the global level as well as within their regions and local communities. And journalism and its skills are also horizontally integrated within the CI ecosystem, with promising trends that core journalistic skills are in increasing demand across non-CI.
What must be made known, however, is a major limitation of this project, that is, that data gathering for this study took place before the COVID-19 pandemic, which has since had an enormous effect on regional and rural publications. For example, dozens of newspapers under the ACM banner temporarily stopped printing as did 60 community newspapers belonging to News (Meade, 2020a). At the same time, since the interviews were done, the News Media Bargaining Code was introduced. Facebook Live was referenced by some our participants, but, with Meta downgrading its relationship to news content and a decision from Meta to not renew commercial agreements under the Bargaining Code, the implications of all this need to be teased out. Further research is necessary to understand the effects of these recent development on the publishing industry, the profession of journalism and the creative practitioners who reside within that active ecosystem. Additionally, in terms of further research, while this issue did not form part of the interview schedules, we feel the proposition that journalists have been disempowered by the impact of digital technology is an area ripe for investigation and could be developed further in future studies.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Australian Research Council (grant number LP160101724).
