If you do not take steps to maintain your privacy, the people you call and the websites you visit will be on record for two years for police and the government to see, without a warrant.

Through the collection of metadata and phone logs, governments have the power to track people's every move, in what is literally an exact living example of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell's famous novels.

The Attorney-General, George Brandis, has announced a program to combat terrorist propaganda on the internet, including real-time monitoring of social media, at a White House summit in Washington on countering violent extremism.

Media convergence, phenomenon involving the interconnection of information and communications technologies, computer networks, and media content. It brings together the "three C's"—computing, communication, and content—and is a direct consequence of the digitization of media content and the popularization of the Internet. Media convergence transforms established industries, services, and work practices and enables entirely new forms of content to emerge. It erodes long-established media industry and content "silos" and increasingly uncouples content from particular devices, which in turn presents major challenges for public policy and regulation. The five major elements of media convergence—the technological, the industrial, the social, the textual, and the political—are discussed below.

The Government has announced the most significant reforms to Australia's media laws in a generation, supporting the viability of our local organisations as they face increasing global competition in a rapidly changing digital landscape.

Communications Minister Mitch Fifield has announced a shake-up of Australia's media ownership laws. So, what rules are being scrapped? And how might their axing affect Australia's media sector?

Australia's level of media ownership concentration is already one of the highest in the world. – Shadow minister for communications, Michelle Rowland, press release, November 8, 2016.

This week APN News & Media announced it planned to sell off its regional newspaper business.

It signals the end of an era. Regional publishing has been at the heart of APN since Tony O'Reilly bought the Queensland newspapers from Rupert Murdoch in the late 1980s.

This paper reports on the findings of a study that examined sourcing, and particularly prioritisation of sources, at regional newspapers in four states of Australia over time. It found that, although the majority of the sources quoted on the front pages of these newspapers were local, the publications demonstrated a strong preference for authoritative sources.

Severe contractions in the Australian media landscape have led to a loss of jobs in major metropolitan newsrooms. In 2015, those cuts spread significantly to regional and rural newsrooms. This paper explores the effects of job loss on rural and regional journalism through a survey of 31 journalists working at rural and regional media organisations whose positions were made redundant from 2012 to 2015. As well as providing accounts of their personal redundancy experiences, this paper explores the participants' opinions of regional and rural journalism. It concludes that those whose positions in local journalism have become redundant are concerned about the resources of local newsrooms and the quality of journalism these newsrooms can subsequently produce.

Google research explores how information visualization can make complex data accessible, useful, and even fun. Our focus is on ways to illuminate the data and algorithms used in machine intelligence.

Share the Facts offers a new way for professional fact checkers—like Politifact, The Washington Post, and FactCheck.org—to spread their work across the Internet. This product was developed by the Duke Reporters' Lab and Jigsaw. Additionally, fact checks are now globally available in Google Search and News.

This paper addresses the patterns of influence between the news media and the public, by specifically targeting breaking stories, or shocks, to a news system. Specifically, we assess media agenda setting and selective exposure by looking at the relative public attention spans to hard and soft news (as measured by query volume), in comparison with the volume of news coverage (in print, broadcast, and Web content) for these selected news events.

Online news reading has become very popular as the web provides access to news articles from millions of sources around the world. A key challenge of news websites is to help users find the articles that are interesting to read. In this paper, we present our research on developing personalized news recommendation system in Google News. For users who are logged in and have explicitly enabled web history, the recommendation system builds profiles of users' news interests based on their past click behavior.

Social content, such as Twitter updates, often have the quickest first-hand reports of news events, as well as numerous commentaries that are indicative of public view of such events. As such, social updates provide a good complement to professionally written news articles. In this paper we consider the problem of automatically annotating news stories with social updates (tweets), at a news website serving high volume of pageviews.

Many daily activities present information in the form of a stream of text, and often people can benefit from additional information on the topic discussed. TV broadcast news can be treated as one such stream of text; in this paper we discuss finding news articles on the web that are relevant to news currently being broadcast.

Costa Rica’s Ministry of Women’s Affairs reports that, during soccer matches, factors such as heightened tension levels and an increase in alcohol intake, can cause domestic violence complaints to spike up by as much as 690%.
To tackle this terrible trend, the Ministry teamed up with Teletica, the country’s leading TV station and sports broadcaster, and Costa Rican Soccer Federation, to make this issue literally as important as the score of a soccer match.
During every soccer game televised by Teletica, a new scoreboard was added right next to the usual match score, with the acronym VCM (Violence Against Women in english).
But instead of displaying a goal count, this board tracks the number of domestic violence reports made through 9-1-1, as the complaints were made in real time right as the game unfolds.
Even though the ultimate goal is 0 domestic violence, a reduction of 40% in complaints was reported after the board went up.