Media International Australia

Murray Goot and Rodney Tiffen were among the six editors appointed to manage MIA after Henry Mayer's death in 1991. In this entry from A Companion to the Australian Media, they provide an overview of the journal's 38-year history.

Former editor Helen Wilson wrote this editorial in 2006 to commemorate 30 years of MIA. It examines the history of the journal, the people who brought it into being and kept it going, and its unique role in Australia's media and academic environment. An edited version is reproduced here because of the comprehensive and definitive overview it provides of the journal's history and vision.

Julie James Bailey was the director of the Australian Film and Television School from 1975–84, and was responsible for the formation of the Media Information Research Exchange, which established MIA. She provided oversight for the first 30 issues of MIA and nurtured the journal through its formative years.

Peter B. White was a guest editor of MIA in 1985 and 1990 and one of the six editors who guided MIA from 1991 until 1997. He is now happily retired.

Stuart Cunningham has been a regular contributor to MIA since 1987, and was one of the six editors appointed to manage MIA after Henry Mayer's death in 1991.

Graeme Turner was MIA's editor from 1998 until 2002, establishing the newly merged Media International Australia Incorporating Culture and Policy in its new home at the Key Centre for Cultural and Media Policy at Griffith University in Brisbane.

Gerard Goggin was MIA's editor from 2006–10, and continues to be an active member of the journal's editorial board.

State censorship in Australia has been rare, controversial and short-lived. There was almost none in the liberal nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, the two world wars, the Great Depression and the new age of terrorism led to more determined, if comparatively temporary, attempts to censor publications that advocated sedition or violence. Moral censorship of obscenity was also rare in the nineteenth century, but enjoyed an ‘heroic’ period following the arrival of a new realism in literature and the age of lurid comic books. The internet has made such censorship almost totally ineffective. Blaspheming the Christian religion is no longer treated as a punishable offence, although attacking Islam may still sometimes be deemed actionable in law. The advent of multiculturalism has encouraged legislation to restrict free speech deemed to be ‘hate speech’, but its application has been episodic, unpopular and ineffective. The contest between writers demanding freedom and censors demanding standards is unending. But at the moment, the balance favours writers.

Despite a preference for conciliation and arbitration, and a commitment to the public service role of information provision, the Australian news media have a long history of strikes disrupting news production. In detailing this history, from 1829 to the present day, this article draws from archival and newspaper research to supplement previously published accounts of major strikes to create a chronology of strikes that halted news production for a day or longer. The sector's strike history can be categorised into three distinct eras: nineteenth-century printers' strikes; major-impact journalists' and printers' strikes of the mid-twentieth century; and low-impact strikes of the 2000s.

For over a century, press and magazine photography has influenced how Australians have viewed society, and played a critical role in Australia's evolving national identity. Despite its importance and longevity, the historiography of Australian news photography is surprising limited. This article examines the history of press and magazine photography and considers its genesis, the transformative technological innovations, debates about images of violence, the industrial attitudes towards photographers and their treatment, the use of photographs and the seismic recent changes. The article argues that while the United States and United Kingdom influenced the trajectory of press and news photography in Australia, there are significant and illuminating differences.

The history of print media in the Northern Territory is one of parish pumps and media moguls, Cold War tensions and human rights crusades. Locally printed and published newspapers have been pivotal to the development of a Northern Territory identity and the cultivation of the Territory's sense of difference from the rest of Australia. From the earliest newspapers – part news-sheet, part government gazette – to the colourful online edition of the NT News, the Territory has been defined by its press and has in turn defined it, in response to its remoteness and to its increasing non-Indigenous population. This article provides a brief overview of the Northern Territory press, the history of which remains poorly documented.

For a roughly a century, from the 1870s to the 1970s, most Australian newspapers ran a section directed towards a woman reader written from a woman's perspective and edited by a female journalist. The rise and fall of the women's editor's ‘empire within an empire’ provides insight into female journalists' industrial situation, as well as a window on to gender relations in colonial and post-Federation Australia. This history matches wider struggles over the notion of separate spheres and resulting claims for equality, as well as debates over mainstream news values. This article investigates the appearance and disappearance of women's sections from Australian newspapers, and argues that this story has greater impact on contemporary digital formats than we perhaps realise.

The history of children's popular culture in Australia is still to be written. This article examines Australian print publication for children from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, together with radio and children's television programming from the 1950s to the 1970s. It presents new scholarship on the history of children's magazines and newspapers, sourced from digital archives such as Trove, and documents new sources for early works by Australian children's writers. The discussion covers early television production for children, mobilising digital resources that have hitherto not informed scholarship in the field.

Early science reporting in Australia – up to and including the 1940s – was often sourced from overseas. During and after World War II, attention turned to applied science, at first for the war effort and afterwards to rebuild the nation. From the late 1950s to the late 1970s, entrepreneurs in science and media in Sydney worked together to provide science material in commercial outlets as well as for the ABC. In the context of the space race, the Cold War and atomic energy, science communication flourished from the 1950s to the 1970s. Since then, science content has been widespread in the television schedules of commercial networks in forms such as children's television, lifestyle programs and news items, and is also apparent in community radio schedules as well as on ABC television and radio. Claims that Australia has little science communication may be based on too narrow a view of what constitutes science content.

Radio broadcasting has played an important role as a medium of information, news and entertainment for Australian military personnel in wartime and conflict situations. However, while many nations have comprehensive units tasked to the full-time provision of broadcasting services, such as the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service (AFRTS) in the United States and the British Forces Broadcasting Service (BFBS) in the United Kingdom, Australia has relied on more ad hoc measures. As contingencies have required, the Australian military has introduced radio broadcasting elements into its table of organisation, the most comprehensive having been the Australian Army Amenities Service (AAAS) during World War II. Now, in a new technological era, perhaps specialised radio for troops will fade completely from the agenda.

This article attempts to begin the process of acknowledging the important historical role that suburban newspapers have played in the Australian print media landscape. It canvasses some reasons for this lack of recognition across the media, including the stigma of a ‘free’ publication. It also identifies the foundations that have shaped the suburban press, and reveals some important, and hitherto unrecognised, collective initiatives that the suburban press undertook to protect their interests. Finally, it raises the prospect that there are significant opportunities for the suburban press to capitalise on the digital era's focus on local news.

Although astrological divinations, demonstrations of psychic powers and the teachings of non-conventional and New Age spirituality have had a ubiquitous presence in the Australian print and broadcast media for almost a century, they have attracted scant attention from media scholars. This article surveys the history of astrological and psychic content in the Australian media from the 1920s, arguing that such content generated new genres of programming and entertainment, and challenged the established authority of religion and scientific knowledge in the public sphere.

Flexibility for many viewers comes from digital technologies and their interaction with television broadcasting. Significantly, as television is switched to digital transmissions, viewers with disability have the potential to experience flexibility in the form of accessibility features such as audio descriptions, captions, lip-reading avatars, signing avatars, spoken subtitles and clean audio. This flexibility may in fact provide some people with access to television for the first time. This exploratory study reports results from an online survey of Australians with disabilities conducted during the final months of the simulcast period before analogue signals were switched off in 2013. While captioning emerged as the most desired accessibility feature, differences surfaced when the data were broken into specific impairment types. This article highlights the importance of digital flexibility specific to impairment type, and locates people with disability as a significant group to consider as more changes take place around digital television broadcasting via the NBN.

While traditional media are grappling with an increasingly fragmented audience and (the further threat of) declining revenue, some players are excelling in the new landscape. The increasing popularity of Netflix and other online broadcasters and platforms is signalling seismic shifts in the way that content is created, consumed and distributed/circulated. As part of this shift towards what Chuck Tryon (2013) broadly describes as an ‘on-demand culture’, we are experiencing an accelerating trend in which digital platforms are beginning to act as TV networks, and amidst this transition independent content creators are empowered by the flexibility of digital media and the proliferation of funding and release possibilities.

Faith-based broadcasters comprise half of all community radio stations in the South Pacific islands. As such, they reflect the deep indigenisation of Christianity and its central role in Pacific cultural identity. But their position within the media environment is surprisingly contentious. For secular community media practitioners, Pacific faith-based media are seen to interject foreign voices and capital into island communities. For the international development sector, partnership with faith-based organisations around development agendas brings fears that aid funds will be used for evangelism. This article explores the role of faith-based community radio in the South Pacific, and argues that they have achieved levels of sustainability that have thus far eluded secular community media through application of culturally appropriate and self-defined development pathways.

Special-interest titles represent a dynamic sector of the Australian magazine industry, yet few studies have been undertaken on them or their histories. Quilt-making titles serve as a case study of one of the most successful special-interest categories – craft – and special-interest magazines more generally. By tracing the evolution of magazines for quilters and by taking as its premise the rhetorical function of magazines in forming communities, this article illustrates the symbiotic interaction between publishing histories, including the exploitation of new technologies, and the sense of self engendered by magazines. In quilters' magazines, this sense of self is most recently pronounced in content describing the ‘modern quilter’, for whom digital media literacy is characteristic. The article's findings are used to advocate further research into the rhetorical and practical responses made by special-interest titles to a competitive publishing environment that is no longer dependent on paper-based delivery of content.

Traditionally, the study of journalism has been undertaken in rationalist terms. This has had particular implications for the study of the journalistic audience focusing on news serving a primarily informational purpose and not as a pleasurable experience. Drawing on fan theory, as well as the cultural concepts of emotion and affect, this article argues that the keen ritual engagement that characterises the investment of fans helps illuminate the dynamics of online participation in relation to news consumption. Ultimately, it argues that this approach enables a better conceptualisation of the online news audience and forms of engagement.

This article examines the relationships between cultural spaces, the image-making practices of smartphone users and social media platforms. I argue that social media platforms depend on the curatorial capacities of smartphone users who observe everyday life and register it online. Social media platforms use databases and analytics to continuously assemble identities, cultural practices and social spaces in relation to one another. In addition to targeted advertising, value is created by leveraging a continuous circulation of meaning and attention. Using the example of a music festival, I examine how the production of value involves channelling the productive activity of smartphone users in material cultural spaces.

This study employed a content analysis approach to consider the coverage of nanotechnology reports in the New York Times from 1985 to 2004. Patterns and trends of discourse within the national newspaper in terms of political, economic, social, cultural and technological factors were examined using a socio-linguistic approach. Results from the analysis of 243 news articles show a significant rise in the number of reports in general, with a specific focus on political, economic and technological factors. Analysis revealed that the three categories not only increased in relation to the rise in the number of articles, but also tended to positively reinforce each other over time. The implications of these findings are significant in relation to how the media reports on nanotechnology and the social and cultural dimensions of technology during the critical start-up phases of the innovation. Furthermore, this study brings into focus the issues of transparency of risk and sustainability of future nanotechnology applications.

The potentially controversial science of nanotechnology is only now beginning to infiltrate mainstream public consciousness through media channels. This article suggests the infiltration is taking different forms, depending on the nationality of journalists reporting on the science. Having completed analysis of a large longitudinal international sample of news and feature articles about nanotechnology, we report that journalists in Australia and New Zealand deploy sources ‘direct from the lab’ to highlight scientific advancements; those in Asia emphasise the nation-building potential of nanotechnology; US journalists provide positive coverage across all areas; and those in the United Kingdom offer the most critical analysis and risk reporting. These messages have also evolved over time in each region. Results are integrated with existing research about public perceptions of nanotechnology, and suggest several themes common to all media reporting of nanotechnology, the most important of which reflects positive reporting or acceptance, although safety concerns and health risks also arise.

Conflict over landscape use, resource access and environmental futures has become a central feature of contemporary political life. Increasingly, these conflicts are articulated, negotiated and potentially resolved across national boundaries and complex networks of media and communications. Within the context of intensifying pressure for resources, market opportunities and changing media practices, this article examines the multi-directional and multi-layered flows of political communication and action that are developing within the Asian region. It outlines a case of recent environmental protests targeted at Japanese and Malaysian companies involved in the procurement and sale of Australian forest products, and reveals how distant supporters are being enabled to join with those affected locally to resist development, end resource procurement and undermine growth strategies.

In MIA 148, book reviewer Vikki M. Fraser was incorrectly cited as being affiliated with the University of Canberra. At the time of writing the review, she had no affiliation.