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Community broadcasting is anecdotally considered a 'training ground' for the mainstream media. However, there is little empirical research that supports these claims around skill development and career outcomes. Similarly, while community broadcasting is broadly recognized as contributing to social cohesion, the focus of much of this research is on audiences rather than the experiences of community media practitioners. This article is based on a broader programme of research that interrogated the experiences of people with significant involvement in the Australian community broadcasting sector to examine the impact of community media participation on career pathways. Here we consider a key finding: working or volunteering in community radio plays an important role in developing robust and meaningful networks, connections, and relationships which are central to shaping personal and professional pathways. These findings draw on rhizome theory to highlight the importance of community broadcasting for building and maintaining diverse and enduring networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Issue addressed: Published evaluations of population‐level social marketing campaigns predominantly focus on impact and outcome evaluation. Evaluation of complementary locally implemented activities and programs, despite being common and important components of social marketing campaigns are rarely published. This study sought to examine the drivers of engagement of local implementers in the Make Healthy Normal campaign, implemented in New South Wales (NSW), Australia from 2015 to 2018, and to describe their engagement with the campaign as well as the scope and extent of complementary activities. Methods: We conducted 13 in‐depth semi‐structured qualitative interviews with health and nonhealth stakeholders from a range of urban, regional and rural settings across NSW. We analysed the interviews thematically, using an inductive and iterative approach. Results: We found stakeholder engagement (ie decision to buy into and commit resources) to the campaign was underpinned by two main drivers: "understanding", or how well they understood the campaign and their role in it, and "perceived fit", or how appropriate it was to their context. A third factor, "communication" functioned to enhance both understanding and perceived fit. Conclusion: Our results suggest that stakeholders would engage with the campaign more where they had a sound understanding of the campaign objectives and content, and an appreciation of how the campaign fits their strategic and procedural context. So What?: Campaign managers should incorporate clear, regular and efficient communication with local implementers and work with these groups early in the campaign development process. Organisers should also support and promote a "community of practice" approach to capitalise on the innovations of those promoting campaign messages at the community level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A region's cultural environment--how people communicate and how local media represent the immediate social and natural environment--is indicative of local dominant normative values that underpin potential capacities for climate change mitigation and adaptation. This article explores this premise with a comparison of two regions in Australia: Northern Rivers (New South Wales) and Ipswich-Lockyer (Queensland), and draws attention to readers' letters published in two daily newspapers, The Queensland Times (Ipswich) and The Northern Star (Lismore), with a specific focus on the Clean Energy Legislative Package. Leximancer software is used to analyse the content of readers' letters published over a nine-month period coinciding with the passage of the legislation through the Australian parliament. The results indicate important differences in local discourses and suggest a focus on local socio-cultural landscapes and their capacities for community dialogue are potentially useful for understanding how communities talk about, and the extent to which they will accept climate change policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The AuSud Media Project is a community media intervention aimed at enabling Sudanese-Australian to develop a media voice. One of the elements of the project was a mentoring program that partnered Sudanese-Australians with working journalists. This article investigates the experiences and assessments of the mentoring program, highlighting different aspirations held by participants, language tutors and journalists, and the power relationships involved. We find that although mentors and participants had different goals for their mentoring experience, the participants felt heard by their mentors and by extension the Australian media. However the mentoring relationships also took place in a system of broader inequalities and structures that raise questions about how to effect change through such media interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The internet provides a means for non-professional media-makers to produce and publish their own video and audio content, as community television and radio have done for several decades. While the web seems to exemplify the principles of media access and diversity championed by the community media sector, it also raises challenges for broadcast community media participants and their online equivalents, not least being the co-opting of the term 'community media' by large commercial interests. A symposium held in Melbourne by Open Spectrum Australia ('Quality/Control', State Library of Victoria, Oct 2008) brought together people with a wide range of community media experience to discuss this and other issues, particularly the possibilities for greater cooperation between broadcast and online community media participants. This paper draws on participant contributions at the symposium to explore the relationship between broadcast and online community media. Despite shared values, we identify different, and possibly incompatible, cultures within the two groups. We argue that this disjoint stems from two different systems of control or validation (licensing and networks), as well as producer-centered accounts of community media that are out of sync with the contemporary media environment. Instead, we propose that theory and practice begin to address issues of consumption in relation to community media, including identification, navigation and the notion of ethical choice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]