This project sought to shed light on the nature of the editorial deficit in different kinds of Australian newsrooms and to gain insight into how editors and newsroom managers would deploy additional journalistic resources, should they become available.

Researchers conducted a series of in-depth interviews with editors and newsroom managers at 12 media organisations, selected to represent a diversity of types – across print, broadcast and online, national, metropolitan and local.

The questions were designed to tease out the way in which the decrease of working journalists – nine per cent since 2014, according to the ACCC – plays out in newsrooms, and in the news and information available to the Australian public. The researchers sought to examine the ways in which media organisations are responding to the pressures, and the choices they are making. They also asked how editors would seek to use any increase in the funding available for public interest journalism.