A veteran UK foreign correspondent says he is stranded in Australia after receiving life-changing injuries as a result of being “tricked” into taking part in a medical trial.

Robert Cockburn, who has reported for titles including The Times and BBC, is currently retired and has released a self-published documentary about his experience taking part in a medical study: Breathtaking: Human Research Crime.

He says taking part in the trial has left him with limited mobility and rendered him largely housebound.

In 2018 Cockburn says he took part in a study at Sydney University’s Woolcock Institute of Medical Research for his asthma.

As a part of this study two devices were installed in his home.

After using one of the devices he says he was left “flattened, dazed, unable to breathe properly”. He says he was later diagnosed with dysfunctional breathing, migraines and high blood pressure.

He feels he was not adequately informed of the experimental nature of the devices and any potential side effects.

Cockburn instigated a formal clinical trial investigation in 2019 led by the then-chief executive of the Sydney Local Health District (SLHD), Dr Teresa Anderson.

This investigation found that the trial Participation Information Statement omitted some information that ideally should have been included, he says.

Cockburn felt this investigation did not go far enough and believes there has been a “media blackout” in Australia over his case.

He told Press Gazette: “No one was held to account. No public health warnings were given to the thousands of ordinary people who volunteer to test medical products.

“In five years the Australian media, bar one story in the Sydney Daily Telegraph, has rejected the story despite its full official documentation by me and the need to warn the public. Trial volunteers are still kept ignorant of the dangers.

“The film was very hard to make, not least because I have to wear sunglasses most of the time and can’t go out now when it’s over 22C. I think I’ve made the scariest film in Australia as far as the medical devices trade goes.”

Cockburn said mobility issues and limited funds leave him unable to return to the UK.

The Woolcock Institute said in a statement: “The Woolcock has cooperated at each stage of investigations into this matter and all formal enquiries into these investigations that have been taking place over five years.”

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Press Gazette has ranked the biggest UK and US news publishers on Instagram with four achieving follower-counts above ten million.

We looked at the news publishers from our top 50 UK and US website rankings to compile our new research.

Two publishers – BBC News (27.8 million) and CNN (20 million) – are above the 20 million mark. When Press Gazette last ranked publisher Instagram accounts (in June 2023) BBC News had 7.4m followers on the platform and CNN 4.2m.

The top two on Instagram are followed by the New York Times (18.2 million) and People (13.6 million).

In comparison, only one news publisher (Daily Mail) from the two top 50 lists has topped ten million on Tiktok, the newer platform.

Ladbible does not feature in the latest ranking because it has it has fallen out of the list of the top 50 news websites in the UK. It currently has 14.1 million followers to its biggest Instagram account. Cosmopolitan, The Daily Wire, The Verge, NME, Epoch Times and Gateway Pundit similarly have fallen out of our top 50s so do not eapp

Excluding the impact of Ladbible’s removal, the top seven remain the same – but The Guardian (5.8 million followers) in eighth place has overtaken Buzzfeed and Unilad (both 5.7 million).

The fastest-growing Instagram account over a two-year period was the New York Post, increasing by 74.7% since 2022 to 1.2 million.

It was followed by Healthline Media (up 60% since 2022 to 1.3 million) and UK tabloid the Mirror (up 57% to 441,000).

Four news publishers on our list saw their Instagram followings decline since June 2023: Buzzfeed (down 7%), sister publication Huffpost (3% to 3.2 million), Unilad (down 2%) and The Daily Beast (down 2% to 452,000).

Since June 2023 only, the Mirror was the fastest-growing (up 45%) followed by ITV News (up 34% to 512,000) and the New York Post (up 32%).

But the follower count for BBC News increased the most in absolute terms (2.1 million) since last year - almost double the next largest growth seen by Fox News (up 1.2 million to 9.4 million).

Four added at least one million followers to their counts - also including the New York Times and People.

The percentage of people saying they use Instagram for news has risen from 2% in 2014 to 15% this year in 12 key markets surveyed by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (UK, US, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Denmark, Finland, Japan, Australia, Brazil and Ireland.

It remains behind Facebook, Youtube and Whatsapp in importance but has overtaken Twitter/X and is still ahead of Tiktok and Snapchat.

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A new local site for coverage of Swindon Town Football Club will act as a test case for a proposed wider network of sports outlets across the UK.

The Moonraker was launched on Thursday by Sam Morshead, formerly digital editor at The Cricketer.

It will serve as a test case for a larger platform called Counter Press which could facilitate a network of sports news outlets across the country.

The Moonraker website is part-paywalled, with full access including weekly newsletters costing £5 a month or £50 a year.

Morshead’s goal is to revitalise local sports journalism, telling Press Gazette it’s about “bringing it back to how local news was run when it was successful in print but trying to find a way in the digital age to make it work.”

Counter Press will hopefully grow “to become a nationwide network of sports outlets, which are removed from the traditional overheads, bureaucracy, red tape, administrative instructions from above and all of the ties that come from being part of large national publishers”, he added.

If and when the network expands beyond Swindon, the intention is that users will be able to pay more for access to all the local outlets involved.

Local news is dominated by three publishers in the UK: Reach, National World and Newsquest.

But Morshead has ambitions on a smaller scale: “We’re not looking to be a Reach. We’re not looking to be the Newsquest. The whole point of this is it keeps local news local.”

He added that “local media underpins a functioning local community and “acts as a sort of social adhesive”.

Swindon FC is currently in EFL League Two. The average League Two football game pre-pandemic drew around 4,500 spectators.

Morshead said: “There is a huge appetite for sport and, by proxy, sports news which is being served in a way that people can read easily, that is accessible, that is clean, that is handled in a way that people want to read it, that has the focus and interest of communities at heart.”

Morshead intends to “return the whole premise of local media to the two groups of people who matter most in the relationship, and those are: the community, the people who read it… and the journalists, who have been often neglected”.

Morshead added that “reporters are so important to communities in that they know what matters locally to people”.

For expansion beyond Swindon, his pitch is that journalists will be able to pay to get use of the Counter Press tech and set up their own version.

As part of the fee Counter Press will “provide the relevant support, documentations, training guides in commercial, in SEO and search, in social… design support and… web development support”.

This is to allow the people who might “typically only have been journalists or content creators to actually run an outlet”, Morshead said.

The Moonraker will also offer its subscribers “community perks” through deals with local businesses.

“So our members will receive benefits from local businesses as a result of being a member, that means that there’s a mutual benefit to the title… they can, for instance, receive a percentage off a service, get special access to events, receive free gifts, whatever it happens to be, through these partnerships.”

Local businesses will get “the opportunity to tap into these audiences, but not for astronomical amounts of money, at a time when advertising for local businesses is very hard in the economic climate”.

The Moonraker will also generate income through advertising but these sites “are not going to necessarily have the same volume, and they certainly don’t have the same intention” as major ad-funded news sites, Morshead said.

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The UK’s £37bn advertising industry is a force for good, according to a new report from the Advertising Association.

Alessandra Bellini, President of the Advertising Association, said: “The brilliant examples of advertising’s social contribution in this report clearly demonstrate the positive impact that advertising can have on society.”

The report on the Social Contribution of UK Advertising draws on research conducted by Credos, the advertising think tank in the UK, which included a survey of 2,400 people.

Some 44% of respondents believe that advertising drives social change versus 34% compared to a survey in 2021.

The amount of money spent by charities on advertising rose by 14% in 2023 to £872m from £762m in 2022, the report states. Cancer charities made up the lion’s share of that £872m, spending £164m.

The report noted that during the coronavirus pandemic a two-year period of online advertising alone resulted in 95 million clicks to government and NHS websites.

An Ebay campaign on ITV’s Love Island, which drew attention to the role of the fashion industry in climate change, is another example used in the report.

After the campaign:

• searches for ‘pre-loved fashion’ increased by 7,000%
• Google searches for ‘eBay pre-loved clothes’ increased by 756%
• Google searches for ‘pre-loved’ increased by 660%

The report noted that after the London 2012 Olympics and Channel 4’s Paralympic Games Campaigns: 65% of those surveyed at the time said that this influenced their views towards people with disabilities.

Eoin McLaughlin, 4 Creative’s then deputy executive creative director, said that every Paralympics campaign has two main aims: “One, is to get people watching the Paralympics. And two, change attitudes around disability”.

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