Café Pacific blog has now expanded into a new independent website

Café Pacific . . . an innovative approach.
IMAGE: Café Pacific

PACIFIC MEDIA WATCH

Journalist, author and media academic David Robie has launched an independent news and current affairs website to complement his long-established Asia Pacific Report.

While Asia Pacific Report will continue to cover regional affairs, the new website — dubbed Café Pacific, the same name as his blog which is being absorbed into the new venture — will focus on more in-depth reports and make available on open access a range of books and articles previously hidden behind paywalls.

Café Pacific will be operated on a Creative Commons licence basis as is APR.

• READ MORE: The new Café Pacific website
• Other reports from the author/publisher

Dr David Robie . . . editor and publisher of Café Pacific.
IMAGE: APR

Dr Robie, formerly founding director of AUT’s Pacific Media Centre and a professor of Pacific journalism, described the website project as “innovative”.

Concern grows over PMC after shock office ‘closure’ and no director

 

The Sepik storyboard plaque marking the 2007 opening of the Pacific Media Centre
by then Pacific Affairs Minister Luamanuvau Winnie Laban  – gone, relocated?
IMAGE: CAFÉ PACIFIC

February 16, 2021

PACIFIC journalists, media researchers, students and other stakeholders have expressed concern about the future of New Zealand’s Pacific Media Centre after more than two months without a director and a recent shock “closure” of the centre’s office.

The centre, founded in 2007 and described by an external review as a “jewel in the AUT crown”, had worked in its current Communication Studies office in the Sir Paul Reeves Building at the Auckland University of Technology’s city campus since it opened eight years ago.

It was abruptly emptied earlier this month of more than a decade of awards, books, files, publications, picture frames and taonga, including a traditional carved Papua New Guinean storyboard marking the opening of the centre by then Pacific Affairs Minister Luamanuvao Winnie Laban in October 2007.

The official line is that it is a “move” for the centre but there is confusion over the actual location of any replacement space.

• READ MORE: Pacific journalism, media and diversity researchers tackle challenges ahead

It is understood that none of the centre’s staff or the PMC Advisory Board members were consulted, nor were they notified before the removal took place. None were present at the removal.