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This chapter examines the changes proposed to the current media ethics and regulation regime in Australia following a government inquiry by former Federal Court judge Ray Finkelstein. The inquiry was prompted by The News of the World phone hacking scandal in the United Kingdom, which resulted in that publication being closed down by its publisher, News International, and principal shareholder Rupert Murdoch. While finding no evidence of similar misbehaviour by journalists and proprietors in Australia, Finkelstein recommended the establishment of a statutory News Media Council, and the inclusion of online media outlets in this new regulatory regime. This chapter argues that such a regime is unlikely to come into effect, given that it will be opposed by media proprietors and working journalists alike, as well the Federal Opposition, and the taxpayer funded ABC, and that a government with low levels of political capital is unlikely to risk much of that capital in a fight with the media industries in an election year.

Dubbed as the “first digital generation,” the millennials (or Generation Y) have been ensconced in digital technologies throughout their lives. As a demographic cohort, the eldest members of Generation Y were the first to reach adulthood by 2001, which heralded the third millennium, and were, therefore, called the millennials.

This research study theorizes that the millennials are ushering an emerging post-digital era that is redefining how we live, work, and play. By situating media consumption within a cross-disciplinary context of mediated engagement, this study analyzed how millennials consume media based on a 2019 meta-analytical research analysis of 22 cross-disciplinary studies, published between 2015 and 2019.

This research study analyzes how millennials curate and engage with digital media and information content in the midst of incessant evolutions of their identity, media use, and digital life. This study explicates six theoretical insights into how millennials consume information and engage with media. In their pursuit of easy access to media, the millennials get most of their information and media content from social media.

In theorizing how millennials engage with digital media, this study explicates important conceptual trends such as incidental news exposure (INE), which refers to people stumbling upon news stories they otherwise would not have purposefully seen or sought. INE spawns “bumpers” who involuntarily bump into news items, as opposed to “seekers” who actively search or seek news content. This leads to the news-finds-me mindset among some passive news consumers who rely and expect other active news consumers to share important news and information.

Purpose – The crime of child sex offending or child sexual abuse is a serious social problem. Since the 1990s, it has been popularly conceptualised as a ‘paedophile threat’ and has become one of the most high-profile crimes of our times. This chapter examines the social construction of paedophiles in UK newspapers and its impact on official regulation of child sex offenders.

Methodology/approach – Discourse analysis is used to establish how newspaper language produces common discourses around child sex offenders. Documentary research of government legislation and law enforcement helps analyse the ways in which official regulation is informed by media discourses.

Findings – Newspaper discourses around child sex offenders construct the paedophile as a distinct and dangerous category of person. This media figure informs government legislation and law enforcement in several ways. For example, discourses around paedophiles necessitate and legitimate punitive legal trends regarding child sex offenders and facilitate the conceptualisation of specific laws.

The conceptual shift towards understanding child sexual abuse through the figure of the paedophile has several detrimental consequences. This chapter offers a critique of contemporary media and governmental/legal discourses, pointing to misrepresentation, sensationalism, demonisation and insufficient child protection.

Value – This research indicates that discourses and conceptual shifts around child sex offenders are driven by the media but have come to be accepted and perpetuated by the government and the law. This dynamic not only illustrates the power of the media to set agendas but raises questions regarding the adequacy of official governance informed by media discourses.

Using a general model of corruption that explains and accounts for corruption across professions and institutions, this chapter will examine how certain practices in the media, especially in areas where journalism, advertising and public relations regularly intersect and converge, can be construed as instances of corruption. It will be argued that such corruption, as in the case of cash-for-comment scandals, advertorials, infomercials, and infotainment, as well as public relations media releases disseminated misleadingly as journalistic opinion, is regular, ubiquitous, and systematic.

The chapter addresses the unique aspects of Brazil’s news agencies and the Brazilian news syndication market. It reveals the pattern of Brazil’s two prevailing business models regarding the wire services industry: that of the State, particularly the federal government, which invested little in a nationwide distributor to peripheral and alternative media; and that of major media conglomerates, which set out their syndication services labeled as “news agencies” in order to multiply profits with no extra labor. In the latter case, an asymmetrical relationship of dependency and circularity ensues between these major conglomerates and regional media groups, who rely on these “news agencies” to perpetuate their dominance in local markets. The chapter also assesses a few causes for this unique model and describes the main players in Brazil’s news agency sector. A concise historical background is presented (Molina, Morais, Saroldi & Moreira) and provides context for the present-day players in the news agency business in Brazil, including the institutional framework they form with their customers, predominantly smaller newspapers. The chapter analyzes attributes of the Brazilian news agency ecology, including the parallel reach of distribution networks belonging to the private and state-owned agencies; the adaptation of conglomerate agencies to challenges entailed by the digital convergence (shrinking newsrooms, multitasking staff); and the prevalence of the interconglomerate model within the Brazilian news syndication industry.

This study based on qualitative data aims to highlight emerging journalistic practices. It analyzes entrepreneurship in Brazilian journalism in order to determine to what extent this development can be regarded as a form of organizational innovation. Over 30 case studies of Brazilian journalistic startups are examined.

The method adopted in this analysis consists of four complementary stages. In the first stage we identify Brazilian media’s political and economic standing and the impacts of digitization on journalism. Then we assess journalistic startup experiences in Brazil through innovation and entrepreneurialism and map the cases. Finally, the fourth and final stage involves interviews of journalists responsible for such startups.

In the past, startups were associated with oppositional forms of journalism aimed at producing alternative views. We find that these startups represent a hybrid of innovation and conservation in news production. On the one hand, they create the potential for journalism’s independence, a crucial asset for the democratic societies utilizing various forms of news production. On the other hand, they remain tied to political and economic interests springing from the neoliberalism that characterize the global media industry.

This chapter focuses on journalistic startups in Brazil and identifies five relevant characteristics of these entrepreneurial organizations. These innovative forms of news production open up spaces for a plurality of social actors and productive sectors. They also offer alternative approaches to covering many relevant issues in Brazilian society, such as legal and judicial topics.

No genre of news reporting generates the same pressures as covering trauma. Multiple casualty incidents, such as the school shootings that are the subject of this volume, challenge reporters to find words for the results of actions that might more naturally be described as unspeakable. To paraphrase MacDuff's reactions to the murder at the court of MacBeth in Shakespeare's play, what take place in the familiar, supposedly safe and mundane settings of school classrooms and corridors are horrors that neither ‘heart nor tongue can conceive of’. For journalists such incidents raise acute ethical and practical dilemmas about how to approach and interview victims and survivors in ways that are less likely to add unnecessarily to their distress. Then there are the news choices which have to be made: how does one produce narratives that are informative and compelling but that avoid playing into the agendas of the perpetrators or inspiring copycat behaviour? And on top of that – what responsibilities do news editors owe the public in assisting them to digest information which may tear through their assumptions that the world is, for the most part, a stable and orderly place?