Where do journalists live?
Authors
Media release
Election 2025: Outer suburban stories, told by inner city journalists
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), Australia has 8,469 journalists, but where do they actually live? Which communities have their stories told firsthand while others are told by outsiders?
This report uses census data to identify in which electorates Australia’s journalists live and whether these electorates are inner-metropolitan, outer-metropolitan, provincial or rural.
More journalists (56%) live in electorates the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) classifies as inner-metropolitan than outer-metropolitan, provincial, and rural electorates combined. Overall, inner-metropolitan seats have an average of 111 journalists each, compared to just 41 in provincial, 35 in rural, and 31 in outer-metropolitan.
Australia approaches a federal election. In the lead-up to it, many pundits argued the contest in the outer suburbs could be critical to the election outcome. Yet outer-metropolitan electorates have the fewest journalists living in them – a trend likely exacerbated by huge cuts in the number of suburban media outlets in recent years by both News Corporation and Australian Community Media.
Out of 15 electorates with the highest number of journalists, all are inner-metropolitan. All 15 are in capital cities, and almost all are held by Labor, Green, and Independent MPs. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s seat Grayndler sits at third place, and the top four are all inner-Sydney electorates.
Out of the bottom 15 electorates, 13 are outer-metropolitan, one is provincial, one is rural, and none are inner-metropolitan. Only 170 journalists live in the bottom 15 electorates, 2% of the national total.
The electorate with the fewest journalists, Calwell, is one of the few in the country where most people speak a language other than English at home. There are 16 such electorates across Australia, and most of them are in the bottom 50 for number of journalists.
Where journalists live has implications for the public and for the health of democracy. In an ideal world, a fair share of journalists would live within communities that rely on the media to inform them about politics, policy, and other critical issues and thereby be well placed to understand those communities’ concerns. In an election where outer-metropolitan seats are purportedly vital to victory, Australian media seems inadequately prepared to cover the contest in electorates where so few of its reporters live.