When I first entered journalism, I probably had a naïve understanding of what the work actually involved. I imagined it would centre on telling thoughtful and meaningful stories that had a real impact on people’s lives. But the longer I spent in newsrooms, the more I realised how the pace of the industry created a detachment from the story itself. There simply wasn’t the time to approach every segment with the care, context and nuance it deserved.

I found this tension increasingly difficult to reconcile. As that idealised vision of storytelling slipped further out of reach, it became harder to rationalise what I was doing there, and whether the news I was producing was having an overall positive or negative impact on the Australian public. Was I misleading people by condensing stories and sensationalising news on a “dry news day”? Or was I simply filling time in an eight-piece bulletin, treating stories like KPIs to be met?

Many journalists become disillusioned with an outdated vision of the industry, eventually drifting into the shadowy world of public relations, not always out of aspiration but necessity. Even now, that move is still seen by many as a kind of “selling out”.

As someone who did exactly that, I’ve seen newsrooms hollowing out from both sides. On one hand, there’s the steady stream of ex-journalists like me moving into communications roles across the public and private sectors, drawn by the promise of better pay, liveable hours and job security, still hoping to use our storytelling skills — just in a different context. On the other, there’s the growing difficulty of even getting a story pitched and picked up. Journalists are being asked to do more with less. I’ve spoken to some who simply can’t take on another story because they’re effectively doing the work of two, sometimes three, people.

When I speak to former colleagues still in the industry, there’s a real sense of fear about what’s happening to journalism, and whether they have a future in it at all. Nowhere is this more visible than in regional towns across Australia, where local newspapers were once a constant presence, delivered by journalists who knew their communities.

Since the closure of more than 200 regional and community newspapers in the last decade, many of these publications now exist only in the archives of local libraries. I’ve come to see that much of what survives of Australian community life exists because someone wrote it down for a local readership, and an editor decided it was worth putting into print.

That loss is what makes the Albanese Government’s recently announced News Bargaining Incentive (NBI) so significant. This proposed law that would require Google, Meta and TikTok either to strike payment deals with Australian news organisations or pay a levy on their domestic revenue. The policy is forecast to generate around $250 million annually, with additional support directed toward smaller, regional and community publishers.

On the surface the proposal is a corrective: platforms that profit from journalism contribute to its production. Beneath the surface lies a tacit acknowledgement that the contemporary media environment is governed not by editors but by algorithms, and that audience attention — the central currency of journalism — has been ceded to a small number of foreign companies whose interests do not include telling stories from marginalised communities in Australia.

The NBI addresses the financial geometry of that loss without addressing the attentional one. Money will move. Some newsrooms will be stabilised. But the policy does very little to alter where audiences place their attention, or to reckon with what has happened to the kind of journalism I dreamed about as a student and that made the local press, for more than a century, one of the most significant archives of Australian everyday life, despite the political biases and commercial pressures that often shaped it.

News editors understand better than anyone that attention is now largely controlled by platforms that reward speed, novelty and emotional intensity. And they are competing with sobering data: 69 per cent of Australians are avoiding the news in some capacity, citing information fatigue and distrust. That’s a lot of eyeballs looking away.

But the attention that these local papers once commanded has not vanished. It has simply been redistributed, unevenly. Social media, and more specifically local Facebook groups, now circulate many things that the local paper once carried in compressed form: lost dogs, road closures, school events, complaints about the council, occasional reports of a disturbance or an accident. There is an obvious continuity.

The appetite for hyperlocal information has not diminished. What has changed is the mode of its presentation and circulation. Where the local paper organised information by editorial judgement, the Facebook group organises it by the engagement metrics of a platform headquartered in California. Where the paper held information against a standing record, the group lets it scroll into the past at the rate the algorithm permits. And where the paper at least attempted verification, the group allows unverified information to circulate largely unchecked.

People may now encounter news through social media first, attracted by its immediacy and convenience, but journalism is operating within the same crowded fight for attention. The birth of the 24-hour news cycle in the 1980s was, in part, a product of that competition. As social media has come to dominate, media organisations have leaned further into a mode of coverage that feels like a constant stream of shock, privileging sensationalism over nuance. Journalists, in turn, are expected to produce this content at relentless speed.

Social media has not invented this dynamic so much as it has intensified it, introducing a new framework within which news organisations operate. Coverage is increasingly shaped to meet algorithmic demands, from emotionally charged headlines and TikTok-style video explainers to stories framed through a single relatable individual experience. In many cases, journalism now mirrors the same content logic already circulating on these platforms.

Everyone with a phone now has the capacity to report and circulate news. Social media platforms elevate the individual voice so effectively that stories are increasingly surfaced through individual accounts rather than institutions. News organisations have adapted to this logic by framing broader issues through lived experience: a policy change becomes the story of one person affected by it, while complex social problems are introduced through a single relatable case study. These stories feel more personal and more credible.

Simultaneously, local newsrooms are disintegrating. “News deserts” are emerging across Australia, leaving many communities without access to local journalism. Eleven of Australia’s twenty largest cities now have only one daily or weekly print newspaper, and in 2024, twenty-nine local government areas had no local news outlet at all.

Responding to this data from The Australia Institute in a 2025 media release, Stephen Long, Senior Fellow and Contributing Editor, said:

The vast majority of newspapers which stopped printing and told readers they were moving online have become little more than a social media page and subsection of a capital city newspaper website… That’s been a disaster for local journalism and local storytelling. Those newspapers which remain have fewer staff and smaller budgets.

This decline has been driven in part by the centralisation of media operations (with the attendant thinning out of newsrooms), in an effort to cut costs. This means news organisations consolidate resources, replacing local reporting with syndicated and homogenised content from other areas. The result is that, in many regional areas, residents find that their local masthead rarely features original reporting on their specific town.

This suggests that news avoidance is not a rejection of civic life but a rejection of a particular kind of media environment. People are not disengaging from their communities. They are disengaging from media formats that fail to serve them meaningfully.

In Australia, the demand for local news remains strong. A 2025 report from the University of Canberra and RMIT found that regional audiences want more local news. In fact, Australians still place relatively high trust in media organisations, while social media is widely seen as a source of misinformation. This suggests we should be cautious about fully embracing the “new rules” set by social media platforms as the dominant way people engage with news.

Instead, the question for the Government should be how to reinforce the parts of the media landscape that continue to attract trust and allow Australians to engage meaningfully with civic life. At the moment, much of that responsibility is still being left to Big Tech platforms, despite growing evidence that this is not how many people actually want to engage with information or with their communities.

The biggest issue with a continual redirection towards social media we are witnessing through the NBI is that the initiative won’t establish local journalists that care about their communities, and we stand to lose important local stories that establish a sense of civic life.

We can already see the repercussions of what poor local reporting looks like. This is particularly evident in coverage coming out of regional hubs like Alice Springs, where reporting can feel disconnected from, and at times openly disparaging toward, the communities it is covering.

Sustained negative reporting on Alice Springs has helped shape a broader public perception of the town as defined primarily by crime and social dysfunction. Much of this stems from issues such as “parachute journalism”, sensationalism, and reporting that prioritises shock over context. Stories are often stripped of the historical, political and social conditions that shape complex community issues, particularly in relation to First Nations people.

The result is reporting that may capture attention nationally but does little to help audiences understand the realities of the communities being covered.

Local journalism has always done the most thorough job of telling “human” stories, but not as isolated case studies designed to capture attention. At its best, it situates those stories within a broader community context, linking individual experiences to shared conditions. This requires investment: in journalists, in newsrooms, and in a genuine commitment to the communities being covered. It is not as fast, nor as easily scalable, as platform-driven content but it is more durable.

There still exist a number of places that do this well. Community radio might be one of the last frontiers that is doing this exceptionally well, with the likes of 3CR and 3RRR delivering local community stories every day.

Similarly, the continued success of independent local initiatives, such as Naracoorte Community News in South Australia, Glen Innes News in regional New South Wales, and Melbourne hyperlocal outlets like Brunswick Voice and The Westsider, demonstrates that when journalism is grounded in place, audiences engage. What these publications have in common is that they are community-led, independently run, and accountable to the places they report on, relying on local advertising, subscriptions, partnerships and community support rather than platform-driven models.

Policies like the NBI may help stabilise the industry financially, but they do not resolve the underlying question of where attention is flowing. Social media will continue to shape how and where news is encountered. What local journalism offers is not a replacement for this system but an alternative to it — one that remains accountable to community rather than algorithms.

I know there are many good storytellers who have been pushed into adjacent industries simply to make ends meet. Revitalising local news could create space for journalists who are genuinely invested in the communities they report on, giving them the time to develop and preserve the Australian voices that might otherwise disappear. Algorithms cannot guarantee visibility for these stories, nor are they designed to value them. But part of a healthy civic society is having the ability to choose where we direct our attention. Local news may be where that choice becomes visible again.