2. Footnote

2.1 Ecology + ecosystems

I missed my supervisory meeting due to illness and haven’t had a chance to discuss incorporating federal politics into my thesis. That might have been a benefit, because my thinking has evolved further. I’ve long been aware of the way that

There’s a kind of basic content analysis-type project which I’ve done plenty of, including as my Masters thesis, but which I’m increasingly finding of limited use when I see it. These studies tend to be focussed on newspaper and digital publication for their ease of access, usually within recent time frames, and primarily big and medium outlets. “News Corp, Nine, the ABC and, to ensure regional representation, Australian Community Media” is a pretty common approach. It’s such a straightforward and intuitive method that there are plenty of cases of non-media scholars dipping in to assess coverage of their disciplinary interests without ever engaging critically with media itself.

Not criticising necessarily – as I say, I’ve done heaps of these types of studies – but it seems like it has been adopted as a default method for answering any large-scale news media-related question, or as a proxy for broader public and political attitudes, rather recognising that assessing a dozen newspapers in three capital cities and five regional cities is only reflective of those papers in those places at those times.

I think it would be a wasted opportunity if my PhD doesn’t push deeper into news ecosystems theories and methods.

Rather than focussing just on newspapers, I’m imagining embedding myself in a particular place and trying to assess the broadest possible information ecosystem on water issues in that place. That might look like going to Leeton for a month or two and, yes, reading the Irrigator and listening to ABC Riverina, but also getting a sense of the media diet of people in town, how they’re encountering news, and what they’re learning and sharing. What is being said in Facebook groups? What are they encountering on YouTube and TikTok? What information is being passed around in cafes and the pub and in industry and council newsletters? What’s the original source of that information? What’s the accuracy of it? How did it move through different types of information sources?

This type of work seems daunting to me, but I’m aware that there have been experiments in it the United States. It’s the direction that some of the civic information scholars I admire – Philip Napoli, Sarah Stonbely, to name just two – have gone in. It makes sense: direct access to news is a small and declining part of the information diet of Australians. I’m not (yet) aware of work that assesses the indirect impact of news on what audiences encounter (I’m sure it’s out there), but I expect that journalism remains a primary source for a lot of that second-hand material that people are more inclined to engage with – the influencers and podcasts and whatever else.

That’s where I’m at at the beginning of July 2026. Still on water information in media in regional areas, but expanding my definition of ‘media’ and, with it, the ambition of my doctorate.

2.2 Zotero

The ‘Inbox’ figure has exploded because I cleaned up a lot of material that had been sitting around in folders on different devices for years. It’s almost all centralised in one library now.

I hit the free synched storage limit (300mb) for file attachments and wasn’t keen on paying for more – starting at USD$20 for 2gb was expensive and clearly not going to be long-term sufficient. Instead I got Zotmoov working and am now storing all the PDFs in Dropbox. This seems to work quite well.

2.3 Recently

Lester L. and Hutchins B. 2011. Soft journalism, politics and environmental risk: an Australian story. Journalism. 13(5): 654-667.

Mayes E. and Hartup M. E. 2021. Passion as politics: an analysis of Australian newspaper reporting of insitutional responses to the School Strikes for Climate. In S. Riddle, A. Heffernan and D. Bright (eds.) New Perspectives on Education for Democracy. London: Routledge. pp. 180-199.