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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]

On the evening of 5 September 1975, 150 women occupied the offices of the Canberra Times, protesting about an editorial hostile to participants in a national conference on 'Women and Politics'. This action, at the production site of the Australian capital's only broadsheet newspaper, provides a context for this themed issue's focus on gendered labour and media. We review recent perspectives on contemporary labour, and note that a persistent theme of this research is that recent changes in the media industries have seen the devaluation of professional work cultures as work in such industries has become more precarious. These changes are set against legacies of the devaluation of women's work within the media, and negotiations of spaces for women to carve out media careers, which are explored by contributors to this issue. The article concludes by drawing out the need for a historically informed position on the gendering of media labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When government statements talk about a secret deal with a multi- national consortium that will see more than A$250 million spent on a town with a population of around 1000 people, questions need to be asked. Basic maths equates the spend to around $250,000 a person and yet many people in the town are unhappy about the whole deal. Tracking Onslow was a collaboration between a university and a local government that used journalism as a methodology to document and interrogate the interaction between Chevron, the state and local governments and the Onslow community over a three-year period. This article focuses on the production of the lead feature of the final edition. It presents the published article and a reflexive exegesis that uses Foucault's ideas about power and knowledge to frame and evaluate the journalistic endeavour. Keywords: Australia, collaborations, community media, exegeses, investigative journalism, journalism as research, mining, reflexivity, research methodologies, resource curse, student press [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Community radio in Australia is now well established and considered an important part of the radio sector, however, in today's economically driven world it is at the bottom of the media money pile. In order to argue for its continuing existence, funding and development in an ever-changing media landscape, some means of capturing its value is essential. This article describes the development of a theoretical framework of value for community radio. The content of the framework was achieved by, first, examining, community media/radio literature through five relevant lenses of analysis. Secondly, a subsequent meta-analysis was applied to consolidate the framework. In order to test the utility of the draft theoretical framework of value, three case studies were conducted with different types of community radio stations in Perth, Western Australia. Two primary research methods were used: interviews with staff and audience focus groups. The testing exercise provided a multimodal insight into the values of community radio as reflected in real life practice. The analysis revealed how value was perceived by participants across three stations as personal motivations, and second, that value at individual stations was contingent upon the characteristics of the individual community radio stations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Volunteer recruitment to functions such as programming is imperative to the survival of the majority of community media organisations. These functions are embedded in the regulatory and 'custom and practice' environments in which community stations in Australia operate. The structures in which policies and processes for programming volunteer recruitment are developed are complex and frequently volunteer-led. Within the context of developing these processes for a suburban community radio station in a major capital city of Australia, a participatory action research project was conducted longitudinally over five years to identify the positive and negative impacts that governance may have on the recruitment of programming volunteers. Three years after the completion of the action research project, we undertook a post-project analysis that identified an active dismantling of the policies and processes almost immediately after the project finished, a continued shift towards hierarchical decision-making and the observable impact of skills shortages within a volunteer board. The project also exposed significant ideological fractures that had lasting effects on the station and its role as a community voice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Around four million listeners in an average week tune into community radio stations around Australia, primarily to hear local news and information. It has created arguably the highest per capita listenership globally for a national community broadcasting sector. This article argues that community journalism is playing a crucial role in addressing the ‘democratic deficit’ by fostering citizen participation in public life in many different ways. This suggests the failure of mainstream – and so-called ‘citizen’ journalism practices – in many respects and emphasises the central place of audience research in understanding the nature of journalism’s multifarious ‘discursive formations’. It suggests that the nature of community journalism aligns it more closely with complex ‘local talk’ narratives that foster the meaning-making process at community level, playing a crucial role in recreating a ‘public conversation’ and a heightened sense of citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Around four million listeners in an average week tune into community radio stations around Australia, primarily to hear local news and information - evidence of a failure by mainstream journalism to meet their diverse needs. This discussion draws from the authors' landmark national qualitative audience study of the Australian community broadcasting sector to explore the role being played by community journalism. The authors argue that journalism at the level of the local is playing a crucial role in the democratic process by fostering citizen participation in public life. This suggests a critique of mainstream journalism practices and the central place of audience research in understanding the nature of the relationships and processes involved. The authors argue that the nature of community journalism aligns it more closely with the complex 'local talk' narratives at community level that play a crucial role in creating public consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]