Overlooked and underused : how Australia's first public journalism project treated women and Indigenous people

Public journalism seeks to provide ordinary people access to the public sphere. In doing so it attempts to offer a place and space where issues of importance and interest can be discussed. Traditional media have been criticised for failing to facilitate the average person access to the public sphere. While public journalism aims to provide this group with access to the public sphere, indigenous media and alternative media have also attempted to create such access for the public. Because mainstream media outlets have largely ignored their voices, Indigenous Australians have sought alternative public spheres in which to engage in public conversation and discussion. Likewise, women are another group that has been marginalised by traditional forms of media. This paper reviews Australia's first experiment with public journalism, done by The CourierMail and Queensland University of Technology, which focuses on reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians in order to determine whether it facilitated access to the public sphere via the media for the Indigenous population and women. Through a quantitative analysis of the sources used in articles published during the project, it identifies the treatment of these two groups during the experiment. The data are examined in light of interviews with journalists who worked on the project, in particular their comments about their sourcing practices. The paper suggests that those practising public journalism in Australia can learn from The Courier-Mail's experiment.