The Voice will be sampled separately as part of our ongoing news sampling project, while it continues to feature regularly in the news.

The upcoming national referendum has been subject to much media discussion over the past several months. Given the significance of referendums in Australia and as reporting on this major public interest issue has ramped up, PIJI began collecting data on referendum coverage as part of our monthly news sampling project from June 2023. 

Sampling commenced in June, aligned to the passage of a bill to amend the constitution, a prerequisite to a national referendum, on 19 June 2023.

These results are reported separately in our sampling, which encompasses any story about the referendum in the sampled outlets across the month, even where it falls outside of any nominated sample days.

As part of our sampling of news in the June reporting period in the Albury-Wodonga region, we found 19 stories about the referendum during the sampled time period. The majority of these were published by the Border Mail and covered the passage of the legislation through both the House and the Senate, positions of a local priest and the church on the referendum issue, and coverage of the politics of the proposal at a federal level.

You can read more about our referendum sampling in our June and July reports.

PIJI expects that the referendum will remain present in news content through to the end of 2023 and will continue to monitor it in our sampling to that point.