Stuart Cunningham

Approaching its 200th issue, the custodians of MIA faced a difficult but transparently clear task: how to adequately respond to the untimely and very much unexpected death of Graeme Turner in November 2025. This would be a difficult task as it meant clearing the decks to meet tight deadlines for publication of the issue in August 2026. But it was also an easy, heartfelt and unanimous, decision as Graeme was one of the journal’s greatest allies and leaders. This special issue will pay detailed attention to Graeme’s work and achievements in the broad fields of media and communication studies. But my task is to set the scene by outlining his stature and achievements ‘in the round’.

Australia is increasingly affected by extreme climate events, and how these events are reported on by the media is constantly evolving. Using the catastrophic Black Summer bushfires in 2019–20 as a case study, this article examines how media practitioners at ABC Canberra navigate the challenges of emergency communication, with a particular emphasis on social media. Through qualitative interviews with thirteen staff from ABC Canberra, the research investigates how social media strategies, including real-time updates, audience engagement and direct communication with emergency services, enable these practitioners to broadcast during catastrophic emergencies. While the ABC still uses radio as a primary communication plank during an emergency, audiences are turning to a multitude of sources, and the ABC is increasingly including social media in its portfolio of emergency communication strategies. This article is focusing on how emergency broadcasting practitioners perceive the changes in emergency communication technologies and strategies, using a disaster communication ecology framework. The findings underscore the importance of an integrated communication approach that incorporates diverse sources and platforms to effectively inform and support communities during climate disasters. What we did find, as well, is that despite these technological changes, journalistic principles such as verification and ethical reporting remain key, as does familiar formatting, which provides reassurance in times of extreme climate events.

This article analyzes the significant events that led to the emergence and growth of the online Indian audio-visual sector. The principal argument that drives this narrative is the co-evolution of Indian formal and informal media economies that led to the media industries’ digital transformation. Drawing on historical analysis of the Indian film and television industries, we argue that just as the informal means of finance, social relations, illegal cable and satellite distribution had a formative influence on how these industries formalized, the Indian online audio-visual sector is driven by distinctive formalization processes, led by creators who are engaging with both local and global UGC-led platforms as well as PGC-led portals. Using a critical media industries framework, with data gathered from semi-structured interviews with ‘above-the-line’ Indian online media practitioners together with trade press literature, we propose an analytical framework that incorporates both platforms and portals as industrial objects for mapping digital production cultures that originate as inherently informal.

As subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) services enter new markets, they become subject to national laws and regulations. This incorporation into national governance is driven by various priorities that include cultural diversity, censorship, and local protectionism. In this article, we provide a critical analysis of the attempted process of SVOD policy-making in Australia, where the entry of services including Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Disney+ has prompted much concern about the future of local content production and distribution. Focusing on the years 2017 to 2022, under the former centre-right Liberal/National coalition government, we excavate the origins and outcomes of a protracted ‘harmonisation’ process that ultimately prioritised the interests of national commercial broadcasters. We also show how SVOD production incentives came to be preferenced over catalog quotas as a mechanism for cultural policy. In this way, our analysis explores how one mid-sized, English-speaking nation initially grappled with the challenges inherent in regulating global platforms, amidst a charged public debate about the future of local screen content.

Over the last decade, several professionalising amateur Australian content creators making popular web series distributed on multiple open platforms broke into the television industry and have since developed promising professional careers. The limited scholarly research into the career trajectories and sustainability of web series creators has typically been conducted as normative critique of the value of web series labour. In contrast, we look processually and empirically at the career trajectories of 26 creators following their first publicly funded web series between 2011 and 2020. The creators’ pathways are varied, but web series facilitated a pathway to career sustainability for roughly three quarters of the cohort. Web series functioned as (1) a calling card for native online creators, (2) a format facilitating career consolidation or acceleration for television professionals and (3) a format enabling career diversification for filmmakers. Overall, they can be a market-tested talent training ground for television, especially broadcaster-video-on-demand or subscription-video-on-demand services.

There are rapidly growing concerns worldwide about the impact of content aggregation and distribution through digital platforms on traditional media industries and society in general. These have given rise to policy and regulation across the social pillar, including issues of privacy, moderation, and cyberbullying; the public interest/infosphere pillar, with issues such as fake news, the democratic deficit, and the crisis in journalism; and the competition pillar, involving issues based on platform dominance in advertising markets. The cultural pillar, involving the impact of SVODs on the ability of content regulation to support local production capacity, is often bracketed out of these debates. We argue this divide is increasingly untenable due to the convergent complexities of contemporary media and communications policy and regulation. We pursue this argument by offering three issues that bring policy and regulation together across the platform-SVOD divide: digital and global players have been beyond the reach of established broadcasting regulation; the nature of the Silicon Valley playbook for disrupting media markets; and platforms and SVODs now need not only to be aggregators but also contributors to local cultures. We draw on three examples: the European Union, Canada and Australia.

Description The Creative Hotspots project, or as it was officially titled Australian Cultural and Creative Activity: A Population and Hotspot Analysis, was an expansive, four-year project funded by an Australian Research Council Linkage grant (LP160101724). This comprehensive national study investigated the contemporary dynamics of cultural and creative activity in largely regional and non-capital cities and towns across Australia before the outbreak of COVID-19 in March 2020. In total, the project conducted fieldwork in 17 creative and cultural hotspots across five states: Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, Western Australia, and South Australia, examining what makes each hotspot “hot”, identifying the dynamics that underpinned their high concentrations of creative and cultural employment and activity. This White Paper outlines the project's findings and outcomes.

Fremantle is a small port city of only 29,000 people (36,000 if East Fremantle is included) that has vibrant and diversified creative industries and is geographically close to WA’s capital city Perth. Fremantle has a kind of New Orleans cultural DNA, where live music is cheap and affordable. Fremantle has a unique socio‐ cultural fabric that has contributed to the city’s large arts community and its reputation as an energetic creative city.

Located a 45-minute drive apart from each other in WA’s Great Southern Region, Albany and Denmark attract creative practitioners who are drawn to the region’s natural beauty and country lifestyle. A regional services hub, Albany has a robust creative services presence with a legacy media sector that functions as a hub for public and commercial media organisations servicing Great Southern and the Wheatbelt. Denmark, while a much smaller town, is renowned nationally as an enclave for locally, nationally, and internationally acclaimed artists and creatives.

There is a fraught history to the relationship between creative industries policy and programs on the one hand, and on the other, innovation and entrepreneurship policy and programs, which have rarely been inclusive of creative industries, although there are developments which run counter to this neglect. But structural changes to modern economies mean that innovation policy needs to shift to accommodate creative industries. The article reviews some of the problems associated with that shift, and notes that a major innovation lever used by governments—precinct or cluster development—has had a mixed record when applied to culture. A focus on one site—Adelaide, South Australia—demonstrates that progress can be made when a clear vision is articulated of the integral role that creative industries can play in innovation policies for economic growth and infrastructure support. Six precincts in inner-urban Adelaide—ranging from pure arts to advanced manufacturing—interact to produce additionality rather than simply aggregation, enacting a productive ecosystem for both creative industries and STEM. The precincts ecology enhances practical creative entrepreneurship, acts as a conduit for the movement of talent as it seeks greater challenge and opportunity, disrupts existing norms in innovation practice; and facilitates access to new markets.