Closing the eye: Looking overseas for Australian newspaper policy options

Earlier this year, Australia’s most recent independently-owned news and features magazine, The Eye, ceased publication. It was just one publication in a long list of independent failures in Australia - recent history would indicate that only publications owned by the major chains are able to survive in the contemporary news media environment. But not all countries in the Western world experience the same dearth of independently-owned news media. This paper draws on research conducted in 2000 on the magazine and newspaper subsidies systems in The Netherlands and Scandinavia, and looks at the benefits of such a policy environment to the independent news media.