The below Data Quality Statement provides information on the context, scope and how to understand and use the Public Interest Publishers Index (PIPI). It is modelled on the Data Quality Framework used by the Australian Bureau of Statistics for evaluating the quality of its own data assets. I do not presume that PIPI is at the level of quality of an ABS data product, but use it as a best practice guide.

Institutional environment

The Public Interest Publishers Index (PIPI) is maintained by Gary Dickson as an independent research data project. Its predecessor, the Australian News Data Project (ANDP), was designed at the Public Interest Journalism Initiative (PIJI).

The project has previously received funding from the Journalism Education & Research Association of Australia (JERAA). I have been commissioned by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) to undertake separate but related work.

I retain authority over PIPI’s inclusion criteria, methodology and decisions.

Conflict of interest

As an employee of the Local and Independent News Association (LINA), a peak body for digital local newsrooms, I have a conflict of interest when assessing member newsrooms for this project.

To manage this, beginning with the start of my employment in October 2025, substantive changes relating to LINA members are reviewed by Dr Alison McAdam, Lecturer in Communication at Deakin University, before they are implemented.

No confidential information obtained through my employment at LINA is used in this project.

Relevance

Scope and coverage

PIPI is designed to maintain a systematic, contemporaneous record of public interest journalism outlets in Australia assessed according to a consistent standard. It records institutional and geographic characteristics of those outlets and preserves a longitudinal record of market changes over time.

PIPI is intended to provide broad national coverage but should not be interpreted as a guaranteed census of all eligible outlets.

The project excludes organisations that are historically or primarily broadcasters, even where they also distribute written or digital news content. It also excludes organisations that do not meet PIPI’s public interest journalism criteria, including AI-based operations and organisations that lack sufficient editorial independence.

PIPI is designed primarily for use by regulators, policy agencies and researchers. It is intended to support analysis of the structure, distribution and change of public interest news provision in Australia.

Reference period

PIPI’s formal temporal scope begins on 1 January 2019. It does not describe the Australian news market before that date.

Geographic detail

A primary geographic purpose of PIPI is to support analysis of local news provision at the Local Government Area (LGA) level. Outlets are therefore assessed for the LGAs they regularly cover, allowing local news provision to be examined geographically as well as by outlet. State/territory and national-scale outlets are also recorded, but these are secondary to the project’s local-news measurement purpose.

Main outputs

PIPI’s main analytical outputs concern who is operating, under what institutional arrangements, in what formats, where they provide coverage, and what significant structural changes occur over time.

Historical versioning is used to preserve significant structural changes rather than every modification to every recorded characteristic.

Classifications and standards

PIPI uses the definition of public interest journalism previously adopted by the Public Interest Journalism Initiative for the Australian News Data Project. That definition was developed to align closely with earlier Australian definitions of public interest journalism, including the approach used by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission in the Digital Platforms Inquiry, while also recognising the broader role of community news as reflected in the News Media Bargaining Code’s legislated definition of ‘core news’.

Under this definition, public interest journalism includes original content that records, reports or investigates issues of public significance for Australians, issues relevant to engaging Australians in public debate and in informing democratic decision making, or content which relates to community and local events.

The PIJI/PIPI definition does not treat analysis or opinion content alone as journalism for the purposes of eligibility and therefore omits the ‘explains’ verb used in the ACCC definition and some related formulations.

To be eligible, news content must also be published to a public audience, meaning it is readily available to any person who wishes to access it.

Eligible outlets must also be subject to identifiable professional or ethical standards. An outlet satisfies this requirement if it is subject to the rules of the Australian Press Council, the Independent Media Council, or substantially equivalent editorial standards. This requirement does not apply to Community-scale news outlets.

Editorial independence is an important component of this test. An outlet is not eligible where it is owned or controlled by a political advocacy organisation, such as a political party, lobby group or union, or by an organisation with a direct commercial interest in the subject of the outlet’s coverage. This does not include the ordinary commercial interest a news organisation has in producing journalism. Community-scale news outlets are required to be editorially independent.

PIPI also incorporates classifications and identifiers from external sources.

  • Operating entity information, including Entity Name, Australian Business Number (ABN), Entity Type, ABN Status and Main Business Location, is recorded according to the Australian Business Register.
  • Local government area codes use the 2025 Local Government Areas classification published under ASGS Edition 3. Remoteness classifications use the ASGS Edition 3 Remoteness Structure.

Other core classifications, including Scale, Primary and Sub Formats, Outlet Status, Change Category and Change Type, are PIPI-defined operational classifications developed for the purposes of the project. Full definitions and coding rules are set out in the methodology and data dictionary.

Cautions

Out of scope

PIPI is not designed to measure every characteristic of a news outlet. As a non-exhaustive list, it does not measure:

  • Audience size, reach and engagement, or whether its audiences trust its journalism;
  • Volume or frequency of the journalism produced;
  • Quality of journalism;
  • Business performance, such as revenue, financial sustainability, employment or newsroom staffing;
  • Community impact, democratic value, or whether it is serving particular information needs.

Some of these may be indicators that are used to inform the data that is collected, but they are not themselves measurable using PIPI.

News deserts

PIPI does not use ‘news desert’ as an analytical classification and does not identify places as news deserts. While PIPI records the geographic availability of particular types of news outlets, this is not equivalent to measuring the total news and information available to a community.

PIPI does not include every type of news producer, including broadcasters, and communities may also receive news and information from volunteer, non-professional and other sources outside the scope of the project. Conversely, the presence of an outlet within a geographic coverage area does not establish that a community receives sufficient frequency, breadth or depth of news coverage to meet its information needs.

Timeliness

PIPI’s timeliness is affected by two separate dimensions: the time taken to detect a real-world change and the time taken to publish that change once it has been identified.

Detection timeliness

PIPI is maintained through monthly monitoring, periodic review and external notifications.

Each month, a monitoring tool is manually initiated to check outlet websites, sitemaps and relevant external data sources for changes.

Every outlet recorded as Open is also manually reviewed at least annually according to a recorded review schedule. Review frequency may be increased where circumstances indicate that more frequent monitoring is warranted but it is not reduced below the annual minimum.

Users of PIPI and other industry participants may also notify the project of market changes or potential errors.

The time between a real-world change and its identification in PIPI varies according to how readily the change can be observed. Changes that produce detectable signals through monitored sources, such as an outlet leaving an industry association, would generally be expected to be identified within the relevant quarter. Less visible changes, such as an alteration to print frequency communicated only through an outlet’s own publication, may not be identified until the outlet’s scheduled review and can therefore have a longer lag of up to approximately one year.

Publication timeliness

Once a change has been identified and assessed, it is generally incorporated into PIPI promptly. Public-facing data on the PIPI website is refreshed weekly on Sundays. Public data exports are produced quarterly and are the principal reconciled data release.

Changes are not published before the date on which they take effect, even where PIPI becomes aware of them in advance. Publication may also be delayed where a change requires independent review under the project’s conflict-of-interest process.

Accuracy

PIPI uses a field-specific evidentiary approach rather than a single hierarchy of sources. The weight given to evidence depends on the field being assessed and how contestable that field is.

Observable behaviour is generally preferred for current operational fields. Direct outlet statements, independent reporting, industry association records, government registers and other external sources are used where relevant to corroborate or establish particular facts. More contestable classifications are subject to greater independent checking.

Where direct confirmation is unavailable, PIPI may apply thresholds and corroborating indicators. For example, the methodology describes that an outlet that has not published for one quarter will be classified as Inactive, while a second consecutive quarter without publishing will be classified as Closed.

Where evidence is mixed or insufficient, PIPI generally preserves the existing classification rather than making a new determination. Where no existing value can be supported, the relevant field is left blank.

Where later evidence shows that a historical record was incorrect, the record is corrected retrospectively. Most substantive corrections are documented in the written report accompanying the relevant quarterly data release. Corrections to Sub Format classifications and URLs are not routinely documented.

Some characteristics are inherently more difficult to observe and may therefore carry a greater risk of residual error. These include unidentified LGA coverage, unannounced ownership or operating-entity changes, and whether an outlet is subject to an applicable professional or ethical standard where that information is not publicly prominent.

PIPI does not currently use a separate formal validation or independent audit process across the full dataset. Internal validation tools are used to identify particular inconsistencies and stale information, including version-date conflicts and discrepancies between recorded entity information and Australian Business Register data.

Coherence

PIPI’s definitions and collection methods are highly coherent with itself, however, it is not a straightforward continuation of the Australian News Data Project.

The ANDP operated from 15 March 2020 until 31 December 2024, with data back-collected in that period to 1 January 2019. PIPI was established as a separate dataset and launched in early 2025 following a substantial review and reconstruction of the inherited data.

As part of that process, historical records were reassessed against the PIPI framework, including eligibility under the public interest journalism content test, LGA coverage, outlet status and change classifications. Change data was comprehensively reclassified across the full historical series using the more limited PIPI approach of primarily recording outlet openings, closures, and changes of ownership, rather than less systematically identifiable and more subjective ‘increase/decrease in service’ changes.

Some fields were inherited from the Australian News Data Project without comprehensive retrospective reassessment. The most significant is the requirement that eligible outlets be subject to relevant professional or ethical standards. This was not systematically revalidated across all inherited records, and is not routinely reviewed in regular record reviews, unless something appears to have materially changed.

Methodological consistency should therefore be understood as the application of the current PIPI framework across most of the historical dataset, rather than as an unchanged collection methodology operating continuously since 2019.

PIPI adopts updated external standards where relevant. Changes to Australian Bureau of Statistics geographic classifications are migrated into the dataset when new editions are adopted. To date, changes between editions have not materially altered PIPI’s substantive geographic claims.

Substantive changes to PIPI methodology are documented in the Methodology and Structure Changelog. Where methodology changes, the changelog identifies whether existing records have been reassessed and the scope of any retrospective application. Full historical reassessment may not always be possible where the necessary evidence is no longer available.

Interpretability

PIPI is accompanied by public methodology and data documentation intended to allow users to interpret the dataset without relying on prior knowledge of the project.

Documentation includes definitions and coding rules for PIPI-defined fields and classifications, descriptions of external standards and source systems, the Methodology and Structure Changelog, and information about known limitations and cautions in interpretation.

Quarterly public data releases are accompanied by a data dictionary identifying each field, its definition, data type, permitted values where relevant, and whether the field is PIPI-defined or sourced from an external standard or register. Releases also identify the release date, reference date, relevant external classification vintages, licence and recommended citation.

The documentation distinguishes between outlets, operating entities, changes and record versions, and explains how these concepts relate to one another. Where methodology or classifications change over time, the changelog records the change and any implications for comparability.

Accessibility

PIPI is publicly accessible without requiring a login. Current data can be explored through public interfaces available from a landing page at https://gary-dickson.com/pipi/.

Public data releases are produced quarterly and include the documentation described in the Interpretability section.

Current and historical quarterly releases are retained and remain publicly available.

Quarterly export data of the Public Interest Publishers Index by Gary Dickson is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

PIPI does not currently provide an API or live data download. Public data access is therefore through the web interfaces and scheduled quarterly releases.