This submission responds to News Bargaining Incentive Revenue Distribution—Statutory Payment Scheme (“the NBI scheme”). Informed by regional interviews, surveys, and stakeholder engagement, it offers seven recommendations: strengthen eligibility, support workforce sustainability, improve funding allocation, broaden journalism roles, establish evaluation mechanisms, reduce regulatory burden for small publishers, and ensure transparency and accountability.

This submission addresses draft Australian legislation establishing a News Bargaining Incentive, prepared by University of Canberra and RMIT researchers. Drawing on extensive regional interviews, national surveys, and stakeholder engagement, it proposes five recommendations: include AI platforms, strengthen incentives for smaller publishers, raise agreement thresholds, require multi-year deals, and enhance transparency to support public interest journalism.

This report is about the challenges facing public interest journalism in Australia and policy responses to its structural decline. It synthesises a roundtable of industry, government and academic participants, identifying priorities including platform regulation, sustainable funding and professional standards. Participants agreed addressing market failure requires evidence‑based policy focused on transparency, long‑term viability and media literacy.

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.

Australia's media market has long been under pressure and now the only national children's newspaper, Crinkling News, has printed its last edition.