The factors that impact audiences’ willingness to pay for news have received much attention over the last decade given a steady decline in advertising revenues and online news outlets attempting to diversify their revenue streams. Drawing on an online survey of 2034 news consumers in Australia, the study examined gender differences in the value of the news as a predictor of willingness to pay for news

Typically free, accessible on-demand and easy to use, smartphone-based applications (apps) targeting mental health have expanded in recent years. This article discusses a qualitative research study with 14 young adults aged 18 to 25 years old who use apps to understand, track, and monitor their mental health. I present four vignettes drawn from a screenshot elicitation and a qualitative interview that

Over the last decade, several professionalising amateur Australian content creators making web series, distributed on multiple open platforms, broke into the television industry and developed promising careers. The limited scholarly research into the career trajectories and sustainability of web series creators has typically been conducted as normative critique of the value of web series labour. In

Erratum to Studying Visibility and invisibility in the aged care sector: Visual representation in Australian news from 2018–2021. Media International Australia. Epub ahead of print 21 April 2022. DOI: 10.1177/1329878X221094374

The Paralympics is globally the largest and most significant sporting event that takes place for athletes with a disability. The 2020 Tokyo Games was heralded as significant in its extensive media coverage that served to promote the disability athletic movement, breaking all broadcasting viewing records from the number of broadcasters, viewers, and a number of events provided live. In the past, however

Migrant construction workers in Singapore produced TikTok videos sharing their structural, social, and health conditions during the pandemic. The platform's user-centered design presents opportunities for marginalized communities to participate in content production and distribution. The TikTok videos created by MCWs richly detailed the precarities they faced during the pandemic. Through the production

This paper discusses the versatile use of TikTok among Japanese media users in the context of the platform's increased appeal during the COVID-19 pandemic. Japanese users have adopted global trends of sharing creative content under prominent hashtags to spread a sense of togetherness in a time of social isolation. As social forms of entertainment are disrupted and paused, the practice of singing and

Researchers studying media innovation and local news tend to emphasise the ‘here and now’, focusing on digital advances as the pathway towards more efficient journalism and viable businesses. This paper argues for the importance of examining media practices that have been preserved and valued over time. It advocates for a temporal reflexivity lens to help inform media innovation strategies and policies

There has been limited exploration into the online engagements of people who are Indigenous and gender and sexuality diverse. There are, however, two separate bodies of literature that provide substantial insights into the digital involvement of Indigenous Australians, and gender and sexuality diverse people. Each has identified a myriad of complex negotiations, interactions and resistances that take

This study examined the influence of fake news online on how social media users viewed and reacted to the COVID-19 pandemic in Nigeria. Analyses of an online survey (N = 254) and contents from Twitter users in Nigeria from the hashtags: ‘#coronavirusNigeria’ and ‘#covid19Nigeria’ (N = 10,408), reveal that social media users in Nigeria used Twitter to inform and educate Twitter users as well as debunking

Over the last two decades, media and associated creative disciplines have moved increasingly towards digital and online production. This shift has seen proprietary software companies clamouring for market share by proclaiming their product as ‘industry standard’ ( Keith et al., 2021). These discourses of professionalism implicitly suggest that proficiency in particular software leads to improved employment

This is a review essay, focussing on Emma A. Jane's (2022) memoir, Diagnosis Normal: Living with Abuse, Undiagnosed Autism, and coronavirus disease grade Crazy (2022).

Ubiquitous mobile communication technologies have played an integral role in the way people navigated forced physical immobilities produced through restrictive measures during a pandemic. This paper critically investigates how 15 ageing people from Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) backgrounds in Victoria, Australia used a range of digital communication technologies and online platforms

The skyrocketing number and severity of issues in Australian aged care led to the establishment of the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety in 2018. Yet, compared to other Royal Commissions, media coverage has been relatively muted, and public awareness and engagement with aged care issues has been uneven. Journalists bear a significant responsibility for shaping the national conversation

While Africa has largely been considered a digitally-disconnected country, recent studies have shown that connectivity figures are on a rise. In this paper, we theorize digital wellbeing in a context characterized by a fast-growing number of mobile data users despite a historically low Internet penetration. It is focused on an ongoing ethnographic research on mobile users and digital inequalities in

In May 2020 at the height of Australia's first national COVID lockdown, NewsCorp Australia announced that more than 125 regional newspapers would either be closed or become available online-only. Queensland was hit hard with 22 regional and 20 community newspapers shifting to online formats, and 15 community newspapers closing. Yet within months of the NewsCorp changes, a significant number of new

This article suggests that algorithmic resistance might involve a particular and rarely considered kind of evasion—political disengagement. Based on interviews with ordinary Brazilian users of Facebook, it argues that some people may stop acting politically on social media platforms as a way of avoiding an algorithmic visibility regime that is felt as demeaning their civic voices. Three reasons given

In Australia, policies that mandate levels of production and distribution of local television content are shaping factors of the sector. Many of these policies are under review due to the impact of new streaming services. At a time of major overhaul of policies, it is illustrative to return to the development of earlier local content policies in Australia. The development of the 1992 New Eligible Drama

The use of media sources increases exponentially during a health crisis or disaster. Similarly, digital health information and misinformation can spread quickly through social media. From the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the press conference has been one of the federal, state, and territory governments’ key outlets for providing updates, containing misinformation, reassuring constituents, and articulating

Drawing on a multimodal approach to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this research critically examines the 2017 “burqa stunt” of Australian far-right populist politician, Pauline Hanson. Adapting Scalmer's (2002) conceptualisation of the “political gimmick”, this paper makes the following arguments: Firstly, that Hanson's “burqa stunt” must be understood as an articulation of Islamophobia and political

This article looks beyond functionalist accounts to consider how fact-checking organisations and practitioners interact with traditional and alternative sites of media power: holding and negotiating that power in their own right while interfacing collaboratively and strategically with those working in adjacent fields. Interpreted through this theoretical prism, interviews and a content analysis reveal

This paper explores the hashtag #AboriginalLivesMatter on Instagram which was widely used in Australia as part of a global Black Lives Matter (BLM) response in 2020. We map the participants and themes of #AboriginalLivesMatter through the quantitative coding and qualitative thematic analysis of 603 Instagram posts published with this hashtag in June 2020. We find that this conversation is largely driven

The paper presents a methodology to understand WeChat Official Accounts (WOAs) from their backend to their frontend, and from tracing the platform's history to its present. Our ‘Backend-in method’ proposes to study platform governance in the meso – between macro political economic concerns and the micro (and usually mobile) user-interface mediation. It shows how including backend platform media practices

Almost 200 journalism outlets closed, decreased their service, ended print editions, or merged with other newsrooms between January 2019 and Februrary 2021, accelerated by the COVID-19 crisis. Regional news outlets were among the hardest hit, intensifying calls for effective government policy and industry interventions to bolster the sector. Although there is a well-established tradition of local and

Digital hostility has verifiably increased over the past decades among adult users of social media and online forums. Both an extension of, and different from, cyberbullying, digital hostility has become a framing factor in the reduction of quality of public debate at a social level and, at an individual level, has been cited as responsible for withdrawal, disconnection and negative impact on health

This article takes departure in the notion of intimacy to identify the critical dependencies with contemporary algorithms. The presented concept of algorithmic intimacies points to how contemporary life is premised on the co-habitation with algorithms which poses various challenges to tactical approaches against algorithmic forms of governance. The article argues that thinking through these algorithmic

Industrial, academic, activist, and policy research and advocacy movements formed around resisting ‘machine bias’, promoting ‘ethical AI’, and ‘fair ML’ have discursive implications for what constitutes harm, and what resistance to algorithmic influence itself means, and is deeply connected to which actors makes epistemic claims about harm and resistance. We present a loose categorization of kinds

In this article we suggest that otherwise unacknowledged histories of technological antagonism can help us (artists, activists, and researchers) to more deeply appreciate the foundations on which we develop activist resistances to contemporary computing. Departing from the case of Brazil, our goal is to bridge historical and contemporary perspectives by: (1) discussing the everyday practises of technological

A concept of visibility frames much scholarship and public writing on LGBTQ + representation in film and television, and underpins diversity reporting and inclusivity measurement. Although visibility is often depicted as a social good, there is a growing critical interest in asking if there are different kinds of visibility, and how these might be differentially valued. This paper reports insights

This study draws on several data activism projects and applies discursive interface analysis to understand the material means by which activist software strives to empower users vis-à-vis data power. The analysis uncovers four types of oppositional affordances: (i) enabling the use of hidden affordances (ii) imagining new affordances (iii) creating meta-affordances (resignifying perceptible affordances

Based on participant-driven media use tracking and self-reflexive media use Vlogs, this article explores how young adult media users make sense of their user agency vis-à-vis algorithms in digital media and how they try actualizing it through reflexive and mundane enactments of algorithmic systems. The article proposes to adapt the concept of ‘small acts of engagement’ to grasp the productive and agentic

During a tumultuous period marked by a global pandemic, forced lockdowns, and educational institutions going ‘digital by default’, TikTok has emerged as a key platform for teachers to connect and share their experiences. These digital practices have been widely celebrated for providing teachers with an outlet during a challenging time, though little is known about the particulars of TikTok's appeal

This article aims to explore the media content during the COVID-19 pandemic. It focuses on the pandemic-handling videos released by start-up companies in Indonesia through their official YouTube accounts. As start-ups were also experiencing the impact of the pandemic, one of their biggest challenges was to communicate optimistic messages to the public with the right content and context. Therefore,

This article seeks to understand how Latin American feminist public expression has gained algorithm-mediated visibility on social media. To this end, a cross-platform analysis was conducted for two issues: the legalisation of abortion in Argentina and the struggle to eliminate violence against women. The data were collected on four platforms: Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube through the representative

When MSN Messenger first emerged in the late 1990s some Australian parents were concerned by this strange way of socialising. However, as the years passed parents’ perceptions of this technology and what it enabled had radically shifted: children were encouraged to use the technology so that they would ‘fit in’ with their peers. It is these sorts of domestic transformations that the authors explore

This article explores how journalists navigate the tensions between community engagement and professional detachment by tracing how journalists used Twitter during Tonga and Australia's inaugural rugby league test match in 2018. As a high-profile Pacific cultural and sporting event, it provides an opportunity to study how journalists engage with marginalised Pacific communities, and whether that engagement

Behind the acronym of various technologies, media business strategies seek to survive the force of new entrants. From the perspective of the social construction of technology, the aim of this article is to analyze, in the context of an internationally growing trend of alliances, the cooperation between the Spanish public corporation, RTVE, and the two main private groups, Atresmedia and Mediaset, in

There is a pressing need to facilitate sensitive conversations between people with differing or opposing views. On video-sharing app TikTok, the diverse experiences of donor-conceived people and recipient parents sit uneasily alongside each other, coalescing in hashtags like #donorconceived. This article describes a method ‘Situated Talk’ which uses TikToks to facilitate a reflexive encounter, drawing

This study explores the application of social media in a violent conflict and examines the role that Twitter can play in communicative processes in light of peacebuilding practices. It bridges a gap in communication research by conducting a war/peace framing analysis on Twitter regarding the second deadliest terrorist attack in Pakistan. Our results challenge the idealistic perspectives of peace communication

In this short essay, I discuss the challenges in measuring the creative economy and Stuart Cunningham's critical contributions to methodology and scholarship in this area, from his foundational work on the Creative Trident and his influence on the Dynamic Mapping to his ongoing conceptual contributions, as in his work on creative industries as social network markets. These contributions remain vital

An obituary for the Great Barrier Reef (the Reef) by travel and food writer Rowan Jacobsen (2016) commemorated its ‘lifetime accomplishments’ in Outside, the US outdoor recreational magazine. ‘News’ of the Reef's demise went viral and the economic and political furore that followed was immense. Tourism industries, especially reliant on international arrivals, were impacted as potential visitors accepted

The purpose of this study is to reveal how children interpret animated movies that include critical concepts. The study investigates the mechanism of 20 Iranian children's interpretation aged 9–12 of animations that contain critical concepts and challenging ideas. Participants were interviewed by an ethnographic approach immediately after watching three animated movies, Zootopia, Kung Fu Panda 3, and

This essay offers an appreciation of Stuart Cunningham's substantial and diverse contributions to ‘reframing culture’ in Australian research, policy and industry practice, from his early reformulations of Australian film history to his recent work on digital media disruption. The essay discusses the range of Cunningham's institutional and intellectual legacies, suggesting that his advocacy for cultural

The Edge of Sacred project was conducted with the Nauiyu community in northern Australia and investigated trauma and traditional healing practices. Study participants from the community identified negative social changes and an escalation in anti-social behaviour, such as higher rates of bullying, violence, risky sexual behaviour and children accessing pornography, when mobile phones and social networking

Stuart Cunningham contributed to important publications that advanced thinking about transnational media flows, much of which remains relevant a quarter of a century later. This essay explores Cunningham's collaborations with Elizabeth Jacka and John Sinclair in ‘Australian Television and International Mediascapes' and ‘New Patterns in Global Television: Peripheral View’ to explore the prescient and

Virtual reality – a site of renewed interest for major players in the tech industry – is increasingly one fraught with questions of data capture. This article examines the case of the Facebook owned virtual reality company Oculus and its intensifying privacy and surveillance risks with respect to the data generated and gathered through its devices. To explore the surveillance-centred structures of

This Special Issue examines the relationship between imaginaries and infrastructures. Through a specific focus on the Asian region, the four articles contained herein demonstrate how these imaginaries span, transform and proliferate various boundaries. They also create new regimes of visibility and present a range of ethical dimensions for those who use them and the companies and governments that regulate

The problem of cyberbullying has been the subject of considerable media attention in Australia and has been framed as a crisis threatening the wellbeing of Australian youth, provoking a comprehensive policy and legislative response to the problem. Definitions of cyberbullying, however, remain contested and there is a lack of nuance in public debates about cyberbullying. This article draws on interviews

Vijay Mishra's meticulous analysis of the Rushdie Emory Archive - Salman Rushdie and the Genesis of Secrecy - is one of the most significant paperbacks to have been released in humanities publishing in 2021 (originally published in hardback in 2019). In one sense this book might be understood as a literary project, one that enriches understanding of the Rushdie's published works through the perspectives

The TV recap has become one of the most ubiquitous forms of criticism in contemporary media culture, proliferating across multiple media spheres and domains. At its simplest, it provides an opportunity for people to catch up with what they have missed. However, it is also a space for engaging with reactions to a program: an inherently affective and social experience. This article seeks to theorize