The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) is calling for input on its news measurement framework to track the extent of diversity in Australia’s media environment.
The ACMA is currently looking for feedback on the applicability of the proposed framework from key stakeholders, including media corporations, digital news and social media platforms, governmental organisations, academia and consumers.
The consultation will accept feedbacks until 5pm (AEDT) Friday 17 March 2023.
During this time, the ACMA will also hold roundtable discussions with business leaders and subject-matter specialists to further explore existing challenges.
In order to produce Australian news and journalistic material in line with community expectations and long-standing public policy goals, this self-initiated research initiative intended to determine whether existing community safeguards were effective.
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As part of the government’s News Media Assistance Program (News MAP), the upcoming phase will help achieve its goal of developing a solid evidence base to guide longer-term news media policy initiatives.
The News MAP will create a framework for future systematic implementation of news media assistance initiatives that is founded on principles and guided by research.
The development process would look at methods to broaden and better integrate current data about the diversity and accessibility of news, as well as how to assess the effectiveness of government measures.
The News MAP is planned to be developed in 2023 with input from ACMA’s work on the news measuring framework.
The proposed framework was developed in late 2019 as part of a broader ACMA project on the Australian news market and was initially presented in a research paper for ACMA in 2020.
Minister of Communications Michelle Rowland requested that the ACMA go on with scoping the prospective implementation of this work in late 2022.
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Source: The Australian Communications and Media Authority
Jaw de Guzman is the content producer for Comms Room, a knowledge platform and website aimed at assisting the communications industry and its professionals.