Media International Australia

On the evening of 5 September 1975, 150 women occupied the offices of the Canberra Times, protesting about an editorial hostile to participants in a national conference on ‘Women and Politics’. This action, at the production site of the Australian capital’s only broadsheet newspaper, provides a context for this themed issue’s focus on gendered labour and media. We review recent perspectives on contemporary labour, and note that a persistent theme of this research is that recent changes in the media industries have seen the devaluation of professional work cultures as work in such industries has become more precarious. These changes are set against legacies of the devaluation of women’s work within the media, and negotiations of spaces for women to carve out media careers, which are explored by contributors to this issue. The article concludes by drawing out the need for a historically informed position on the gendering of media labour.

From its beginnings in 1923, the BBC employed a sizeable female workforce. The majority were in support roles as typists, secretaries and clerks but, during the 1920s and 1930s, a significant number held important posts. As a modern industry, the BBC took a largely progressive approach towards the ‘career women’ on its staff, many of whom were in jobs that were developed specifically for the new medium of broadcasting. Women worked as drama producers, advertising representatives and Children’s Hour Organisers. They were talent spotters, press officers and documentary makers. Three women attained Director status while others held significant administrative positions. This article considers in what ways it was the modernity and novelty of broadcasting, combined with changing employment possibilities and attitudes towards women evident after the First World War, that combined to create the conditions in which they could excel.

This article examines the pervasive mechanisms of discrimination in Australian public broadcasting in the 1950s and 1960s and considers how concepts of femininity were engaged to maintain the sexual division of labour within one of Australia’s leading cultural institutions, the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC). Constructing a collective biography of female producers who challenged gendered work practices, it discusses the obstacles that confronted women in production and considers the social, economic and industrial factors that allowed certain women to become producers when many failed to escape the ABC’s typing pool. Referring to case studies derived from biographical memory sources and industrial documentation, this article historicises the careers of radio and television producers and contextualises their histories against data found in the 1977 Women in the ABC report, to re-imagine the nature of women’s work in Australian broadcasting in the post-war era.

Margaret Jones (1923–2006) was a trailblazer for women in Australian journalism. A member of the press for more than 30 years, she assumed senior positions at the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) from the 1960s, earning a reputation in the process as an exceptional print journalist. From the beginning, Jones was noted for challenging head-on the sexism she encountered in the media industry. She became foreign correspondent for the SMH in New York, Washington, London and Beijing, helping to carve out roles for women in serious mainstream journalism. This article traces Margaret Jones’ career as reporter and feature writer with the publishing house Fairfax, as a contribution to Australian feminist cultural history and the history of women in newspaper journalism.

In 1975, Fairfax News commemorated International Women’s Year by appointing Lorrie Graham as its first female cadet photographer. Women only joined the photographic staff of newspapers in significant numbers from the 1980s and were more likely to be employed on regional newspapers than the metropolitan dailies. This article draws on interviews with male and female press photographers collected for the National Library of Australia’s oral history programme. It provides an overview of the history of women press photographers in Australia, situating their working lives within an overtly masculine newspaper culture where gender inequity was entrenched. It also examines the gendered and evolving photographic representations of women in the Australian press, including those of women in positions of social and political leadership. Although women press photographers have achieved greater recognition in the 2000s, the transformation of the media industry has impacted the working practices and employment of press photographers.

In the aftermath of Second World War and in the beginning years of the Cold War, newly elected Prime Minister Robert Menzies reaffirmed the institutional relationship between masculinity and breadwinning that also spoke to a specific national ideal. In accordance with the ‘national narrative of work’, this article looks to historicise the relationship between historically specific understandings of gender and work, and how that relationship was represented in the 1954 Australian film King of the Coral Sea. Based around the pearling industry in the Torres Strait, the film’s narrative shows the introduction of new technology and the management of the workplace; both these representations functioned in accordance with post-war middle-class values. This article argues that King of the Coral Sea’s engagement with gendered ideals of work and class not only carries specific national meanings but also had broader implications for understandings of masculinity in the context of the Australian 1950s.

In the 21st century, ‘playing’ football at the elite level is a profession in a multi-billion dollar business. However, the way it is imagined in media discourse and the popular imagination positions football and its athletes as transcending mere ‘work’, portraying them as ‘larrikin’ national heroes, pseudo-religious figures and role models. Taking the case of Andrew Lovett as a case study, a footballer ultimately fired after being charged with sexual assault, this article demonstrates the persistence of ‘non-work’ discourses in media reporting using mixed-methods discourse analysis. It shows how ‘transcendent’ discourses provide a logical framework that makes treating footballers differently from those in other public professions seem reasonable, enabling clubs and leagues to act in their own best interests.

Social media–based platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are increasingly being used by feminists across the globe as a way to capture and harness wider audiences and draw their attention to individual campaigns and social issues. However, the moderators who work behind the scenes on these feminist campaigns are largely unrecognised for their work. This article frames the work of these activists as a form of digital labour – and one that carries series of consequences for the movement in relation to activist burnout. In this article, I draw on data gathered from interviews undertaken with representatives from three Australian-based contemporary feminist campaigns in order to demonstrate that feminist campaigners within contemporary online feminist campaigns undertake a form of digital labour and examine the effects of this labour for activists involved in these groups.

Influencer commerce has experienced an exponential growth, resulting in new forms of digital practices among young women. Influencers are one form of microcelebrity who accumulate a following on blogs and social media through textual and visual narrations of their personal, everyday lives, upon which advertorials for products and services are premised. In Singapore, Influencers are predominantly young women whose commercial practices are most noted on Instagram. In response, everyday users are beginning to model after Influencers through tags, reposts and #OOTDs (Outfit Of The Day), unwittingly producing volumes of advertising content that is not only encouraged by Influencers and brands but also publicly utilised with little compensation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among Instagram Influencers and followers in Singapore, this article investigates the visibility labour in which followers engage on follower-anchored Instagram advertorials, in an attention economy that has swiftly profited off work that is quietly creative but insidiously exploitative.

This is the expanded text of the Henry Mayer Memorial Lecture presented by Graeme Turner at the University of Queensland in November 2015. In it, he outlines his argument from his book, Re-inventing the Media, before going on to draw upon that argument to present a series of issues that need to be addressed by critical media studies in the future: the challenge of a bifurcating field, the thoroughgoing commercialisation of the media, and media studies’ drift away from the interrogation of the operation of power in the relations between the media, their audiences and the state.

This article conceptualises The Australian as the nation’s ‘keystone media’ on Indigenous affairs. Nielsen’s term ‘keystone media’ captures the critical importance of particular news outlets that play what he terms an outsize role in defining the state and structure of wider media and political environments. The article analyses the factors at play in The Australian’s sponsorship of a particular political agenda for this complex field of social policy. The argument is illustrated through an examination of Indigenous health coverage from 1988 to 2008, textual analysis of 137 columns written by Noel Pearson, and research interviews with key actors in the Indigenous policy realm, including journalists, public servants and Indigenous commentators. Through this examination of its reporting and collaboration with Pearson, we contend The Australian has advanced a range of neoliberal and interventionist policies to government and the public.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) weekly political discussion program Q&A aims to make Australian politics more engaging to ordinary citizens by allowing direct access between ‘punters’ and ‘pollies’. The program is a unique forum in the Australian political public sphere where citizens (represented by the studio audience) are awarded greater power than in conventional political news and current affairs formats. However, some critics have argued that the program is, among other things, overly editorialized and contrived and more autocratic than democratic, where the power of the citizen is superficial only. Using data gathered from focus groups, this article explores attitudes toward the role of the audience questioners on Q&A – one of the defining ‘democratizing’ features of the program. Considering responses of viewers with both high and low levels of political engagement has led to interesting findings about how motivations for watching Q&A, as well as expectations about how it should function, differ according to viewers’ pre-existing level of political interest.

This article draws on ‘hyperlocal’ journalism scholarship to explore the civic functions of Australian local reporting in the digital age. Through place-based case studies based on interviews with media and civic leaders from three disparate communities, we find community groups are engaging with social media, particularly Facebook, to connect locals to services and community news. Community service providers are increasingly adept at using social media and, in many cases, prefer it to legacy media to gather, disseminate and exchange news. Concurrently, legacy media have lost newsroom resources that limit their practice of ‘shoe leather’ journalism and increase their dependence on official sources without independent verification. Yet, journalists are adapting to newsroom cutbacks by forming symbiotic relationships with non-media news providers, including local police. We find there are promising alternatives for fostering civic discourse and engagement through digital technologies despite less traditional local news and a reduced capacity for verified journalism.

While there is much research to describe journalists’ use of social media to source and disseminate news about major events and interact with global audiences, there are few studies that focus on journalists’ use of social media within everyday news practices. This article uses qualitative surveys to provide a preliminary understanding of how journalists in Australia are utilising social media content in everyday news sourcing and reportage. The purpose of this study is, first, to understand journalists’ perceptions of how and why they use social media to source news and information and, second, to understand the organisational and professional implications for news sourcing in social media-enabled environments.