What Is The Shipping News?
How a sharp increase in the cost of press visas to Nauru inspired a fund to support investigative reporting.
“It’s not the Government’s job to run a shipping news service for the people smugglers,” he said.
In January 2014, the government of Nauru, the remote and tiny Micronesian island where the Australian Government runs an off-shore immigration detention facility, announced that the cost of a journalist’s visa had risen from AUD$200 to AUD$8000.
For many already-stretched news organisations faced with staff cuts and shrinking budgets, this cost could prove prohibitive for outlets working to continue to send their correspondents there.
GetUp’s members responded to this by raising money to cover the cost of journalists’ access to Nauru. From there the project grew to incorporate other areas of reporting on the Government’s immigration policies.
Pitches were open to all Australian journalists working anywhere in the world with an idea for a carefully reported, in-depth story about asylum seeker issues in Australia.
An independent selection committee of veteran reporters and editors convened and awarded the grants to a broad cross-section of reporters and story producers working across disparate mediums. Their resulting work appeared at The Guardian, The Monthly, The Saturday Paper, VICE, The Big Issue and Junkee, among others.
A collection of all The Shipping News stories can be viewed here.
We thank all our donors for their support and the journalists whose work that support has funded so far.
