Just recently, the 13th Australian Media Traditions Conference was held on the 20th and 21st of September at the University of Southern Queensland, or UniSQ, in the Garden City of Toowoomba in Brisbane on the theme "Beyond Boundaries."

Thirty-six paper presenters, who were largely PhDs and PhD candidates from various universities on the Australian continent and beyond, each had 20 minutes to share their research and scholarly works in the field of communication in the context of the digital age.

Most conferees came from the universities of Southern Queensland, Queensland, Macquarie, La Trobe, RMIT, Monash, James Cook, Swinburne, Deakin, South Australia, Melbourne, Canberra and QUT — all in Australia — while two were from the University of China and the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, and one from the University of the Philippines (the only Filipino in the pack).

Each day featured a keynote speaker, a morning tea, lunch, afternoon tea and dinner.  Everyone received a ring-bound booklet that contained the individual abstracts and biographies of every participant.

The various subthemes delved into — literature, journalism, television drama, civic engagement, music industry, radio, cinema, mobile developments, media/politics/issues, technologies and globalization, SVODs in Australia, creation and content production, and archives (i.e., collection of digital/social media at the National Library of Australia) — were all reflective of the contemporary communication and media ecosystem. For one, this author presented his paper titled, "Scoping the reformative and transformative impact of media traditions."

Let me share, dear readers, what my seminal and expository paper was all about. The terms reformative and transformative simply refer to access to news, entertainment, or information in various modalities, while impact, as a term, refers to "hit," it denoting who are adversely affected in an era of digital media (i.e., print newspapers, periodicals, magazines and other forms of publishing). These social and economic dimensions are on opposite ends of a continuum.

There's no need to be an apologist for print newspapers since the notion that the "editor is dead" in this digital age is a myth. Neither is there such a thing as the "golden age of journalism," as one presenter embraced the view — with some authority based on her research — that it never existed.