Pitching and distribution platform Medianet has partnered with Andrew Jaspan’s Australia-based global wire service 360info in what the two say is an initiative to counteract misinformation and boost public interest journalism.

Jaspan (pictured) – who founded and subsequently left The Conversation after a career which included editorship of The Age – established 360info last year with funding from Monash University.

After partnering with universities throughout the world, it now claims a “combined potential reach” of 350 million readers, although Jaspan says the service has so far proven most valuable to smaller regional and rural community papers in Australia.

“These outlets have often been hit the hardest by digital developments and the collapse of the traditional advertising model of funding,” he says. “Sometimes struggling to bring out the paper or pay staff to cover stories, they now have free access to a feed of rich, explanatory, corrective or contextual features content to slot straight in or repurpose as they see fit.”

Medianet will now provide 360info with a direct link to more journalists and newsrooms. Managing director Amrita Sidhu says he is proud to support 360info’s work, “which counteracts many of the biggest threats to public interest journalism identified by journalists in the 2023 Australian Media Landscape report.

“An increase in disinformation was identified as a threat to public interest journalism by almost three quarters (71 per cent) of the more than 1,000 Australian journalists we surveyed last year,” Sidhu said. Supporting the work of journalists and a thriving media industry was “one of our key objectives”.

360info’s content is available on their website and the Medianet Newshub for any media outlet and newsroom to access and use without charge.