This survey report forms part of the Public Interest Journalism Initiative's ongoing work to understand how the community values public interest journalism, including surveys conducted at six-month intervals commencing from October 2019.

In the wake of threats by Google and Facebook to scale back or close services in Australia should the federal government proceed with plans to charge them for news content, this report identifies serious risks to Australian businesses, government services and consumers if services are withdrawn.

This report is based on a survey of 2,038 regional news consumers. The aim of the study is to identify gaps in local news provision in regional parts of Australia and whether there is an appetite for new grassroots news offerings.

There have been government and industry programmes developed to assist regional journalism, but the voices of practitioners are often missing from the debate. The central aim of this study is to find out what regional journalists need to keep serving their communities and how they see the future.

This report forms part of PIJI’s ongoing work to understand how the community values public interest journalism, including surveys conducted at six-month intervals commencing from October 2019.