Exploring small newspaper attitudes to a collaborative approach with Australia’s primary public broadcaster (ABC)

Abstract

Collaborative approaches to news production are increasingly being trialled across the globe in an attempt to alleviate a well-documented crisis in local news. Of particular interest to Australian policy-makers is the BBC Local Democracy Reporting project which funds journalists to be based in local news outlets to provide local government reporting, as well as data journalism initiatives. There is political will that such an approach could be adopted by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation to support the nation’s rural and regional news provisions. This article draws on data from six interpretive focus groups involving 50 news workers from independent Australian local news publishers to consider whether smaller publishers would welcome a collaborative approach with the ABC. It finds that a one-size-fits-all collaborative approach is unlikely to be suitable for the Australian regional media landscape and that more work is needed developing an understanding of an appropriate framework that may be tailored to best meet the needs of different local news outlets.