After establishing a coursework journalism Masters program two decades ago, UTS this year launches Australia’s first Graduate School of Journalism. The School aims to become Australia’s premiere journalism education provider by underpinning its successful post graduate journalism teaching with research on journalism by journalists.

The Australian Research Council has redefined research to include quality journalism, thereby allowing a research track record for reporters, editors and producers.

As a result, UTS has opened the doors of its PhD and research Masters program to Australia’s leading working journalists. It has created a stream of higher research degree candidates drawn from the top ranks of the industry; professionals who will be able to advance knowledge about journalism through research, teaching, and mentoring. They include:

Elizabeth Jackson

Elizabeth Jackson presents and produces the Australian Broadcasting Corporation programs, Saturday AM and Correspondents Report. She has extensive experience in current affairs radio and television, working as reporter for programs including the 730 Report and Landline.  In 2008, Elizabeth won the Donald McDonald Reuters Scholarship to Oxford University. She studied Freedom of Information law at Oxford. Elizabeth is currently investigating how newsroom culture shapes the news.

Peter Cronau

Peter Cronau is a senior producer at Four Corners, which celebrated half a century of investigative journalism last year. Peter Cronau worked for 10 years in the community sector before commencing his journalistic career in community radio in Sydney. As a freelance journalist, he has published in many of Australia’s major newspapers. Cronau obtained a Masters in journalism from UTS’s graduate journalism program in 1991, has lectured in journalism studies, and was Director of the ACIJ at UTS in 1995/6. In 1998, Peter started work as a researcher at ABC TV’s Four Corners, later working as a producer for Media Watch and a reporter for ABC Radio’s Background Briefing. He has won numerous journalism awards including the Gold Walkley in 2006. Peter is presently writing a book relating to human rights and journalism.

Le Tan Du

Le Tan Du is a lecturer in journalism at University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Ho Chi Minh city. She has worked as a correspondent for Vietnam’s national television, and writes for the Saigon Business Interpreter weekly  newspaper. She has a Masters degree in Media Practice at Sydney University. She is investigating how the media covers immigration to Australia. 

Tuan Anh

Anh Tuan Vu is lecturer in the Online Journalism group, Faculty of Radio and Television at the Academy of Journalism and Communication (AJC), Hanoi, Vietnam. He has been working as a lecturer for almost 9 years teaching  Introduction to Online Journalism, Audio for web, Video for web, Online news, etc. He is also working part-time for Bay Vut- a Vietnamese online journalism of ABC Radio in Australia. Anh is researching social media to online journalism in Vietnam.

Karl Wilson

Karl Wilson has been a journalist for more than 35 years.  He began his career on the The Australian in 1972. In 1976 he was posted to London where he covered assignments in Northern Ireland, Europe and Africa. For the last 20 years Karl was based in Asia where he was foreign editor of the South China Morning Post, editor of the Sunday Standard, foreign editor of the Eastern Express and editor of The Standard in Hong Kong. From 2004 till August 2009 he was bureau chief in Manila for Agence France-Presse. Karl was the Philippines correspondent for The National in Abu Dhabi up until the end of 2010 when he relocated back to Australia. For the past 12 months he have been a senior correspondent for the China Daily Asia Weekly covering Australia and Southeast Asia. Karl  will investigate how free speech in the Philippines is compromised by violence against journalists.

Greg Wilesmith

Greg Wilesmith is one of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s most experienced foreign correspondents. As one of the ABC’s Europe Correspondents Wilesmith reported the guerrilla war in Kosovo in 1998 and reported from the Yugoslav capital, Belgrade, during the entirety of the NATO bombardment of Serbia in 1999. As one the ABC’s Middle East Correspondents between 1987 and 1991, reporting the Gulf War from Iraq and Saudi Arabia, entering Kuwait as it was liberated by Coalition forces. He began his international reporting career in the late 1970s in East Africa freelancing for the ABC, BBC Africa Service and British newspapers.

The Higher Research Degree candidates are complimented by adjunct professors from industry.

Matt Peacock

Adjunct Professor Matt Peacock is an award-winning journalist with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, where he has worked for a wide range of TV and radio programs. He has been chief political correspondent for current affairs radio in Canberra, as well as foreign correspondent in London (2001-2003), Washington (1990-1992) and New York (1993).He is author of several books, including “Asbestos: Work as a Health Hazard” (ABC Books, 1978), “The Forgotten People- a History of Australia’s South Sea Islanders” (ABC Books, 1978), and more recently a history of the former Australian asbestos manufacturer James Hardie, “Killer Company” (HarperCollins, 2009), which is soon to become a dramatic mini-series.

Some respondents said they simply used social media to publicise their stories.

Rebecca Aguilar  of Dallas, Texas, said she “used them all”.  “Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Tumbler, Digg, I figure it doesn’t hurt to spread the wealth. It’s free too!”  Sri Wiyanti of West Java, used  Twitter “to publish my article”. “Also find some updates from those who are on the spot.” Catherine Kustanczy  of New York,  said she didn’t know any journalist who didn’t use social media. “Try @AntDeRosa & @acarvin -both great journalists and prolific tweeters,” she said.

Increasing numbers of journalists were using social media to help them gather information.

Jacqueline Mary of San Diego, said she was starting to use social media “to market my articles on Examiner.com”. “I also use social media to find stories to research for my original reporting or to summarize articles,” she said.

I use paperli.com to research what is more buzzworthy online and what the news fanatics are focused on. Paperli is a service that chooses stories posted on Facebook and Twitter. I find that it often points me to more relevant or alternative stories to look over that i would not have found otherwise.

Simba Shani Kamaria Russeau of Egypt, said that he had been doing “a lot of research the past month” on how other journalists were using Facebook and Twitter for their work. Rousseau’s profile described him as a photographer and writer at Inter Press Service, who had authored two human rights reports.

What I find interesting is that some of the journalists that I follow use both Twitter and Facebook to get interviews to stories by asking questions online. Personally I haven’t tried that tactic but I have started posting updates of big events happening here in Egypt and I use both outlets to post articles from my blog or that I do for news outlets.

Some respondents were actually involved in online startups which they hoped would offer alternatives to mainstream media.

Phillip H. Perez of Los Angeles, was “the Chief Operating Officer of www.NewsTippers.com” – a place for amateur and professional citizen reporters. “It’s FREE and easy to use,” he said. However, like many citizen journalists’ sites coverage was patchy.

Nicole Staudinger  was an Oregon based journalist, involved in the much more complex information exchange site, Journalism Accelerator “Our organization… utilizes Twitter for networking with the journalism community.,” she said “Twitter is a highly active element of our site and we have found it to be very useful”. The Journalism Accelerator was “a forum with a pulse, a place where individuals working across the journalism spectrum have a simple way to connect directly, seek expertise or share it across channels”.

The Journalism Accelerator does not replace or attempt to replicate the good work of others, but to accelerate these good works by offering more exposure to a broader audience, across areas of expertise. Beyond the usual suspects, the JA forum invites a range of industry experts into the conversation. Journalism Accelerator aggregates and curates knowledge, tactics, questions, resources, reviews, ideas, cautions, use case and community.

Joe Banks, a journalism professor of Algonquin College in Ottawa, Canada, reckoned “We should compare notes and blogs”. “I have a journalism-related one as well at www.joebanks.ca that I eventually intend to turn into a “current practices” e-textbook for my students that would be continually changing as techniques change”, he wrote.

Good idea!

Related articles

• Tweeting the News (Alan Knight)
• For a reporter, Twitter makes sense (Joe Banks)

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 10,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

eJournalist is a free, open access refereed academic journal analysing journalism. It was created more than a decade ago, to allow a globalised interchange of ideas.

You are free to search the eJournalist  for sources which might aid your studies or research. Copyright for all material resides with the authors. We only ask that you properly attribute their work, through references and in your bibliographies, if you choose to use it.

Alan Knight

Is print journalism creative?  by Janet Fulton

The idea that print journalism is creative is one that is not universally accepted: ‘making a story up’ goes against the fundamental understandings of journalism. Further to this, society’s understanding of creativity is that a producer must have no limitations to be able to create and the rules and conventions a journalist works within are seen to constrain their production of creative media texts.

Unusual Suspects: A Newspaper’s Coverage of a Scuba Diving Rescue and Journalism’s Role in Narrating Australia

Dr Janine Little

The scuba dive rescue story analysis presented here reflects contemporary journalism’s role in the formation of ideas about cultural value and character, and in more complex determinations of who gets a participatory stake in the formation of national narratives. As such, the article concludes with some signposts toward a critical approach to journalism-centred studies of culture in Australia.

Australian creative non-fiction: Perspectives and opinions

Dr Sue Joseph

Figures confirm that Australians avidly read their ‘creative non-fiction’. But most would be unable to name the genre – it is not as widely defined or discussed in Australia as it is in the USA and UK, where it is actively debated and anthologised.
This paper goes to the heart of the genre in Australia, investigating through narrative interview why there is not more of an Australian voice in this international debate. It examines the perspectives and views of twelve of the country’s most widely read, awarded and respected creative non-fiction authors, drawing them into the discussion.

The budding of free speech in the mountain Kingdom of Bhutan

Kesang Dema and Prof Alan Knight

Democracy and free speech is creating an active and articulate mediasphere in tiny Bhutan, a country which uniquely places happiness before economic growth. As recently as 2002, Reporters Without Borders rated Bhutan 135 out of 139 in its Press Freedom Index.
This article examines the evolution of these media freedoms since the elections. It does so by surveying the attitudes of more than half of all of Bhutan’s registered journalists, seeking their opinions on dealing with government and bureaucracy. The survey has been complimented by a content analysis of Bhutan’s oldest newspaper, Kuensel, as it reported on democracy and change.

News media representations of homelessness: Do economic news production pressures prevent journalists from adequately reporting complex social issues

Paul Rossall

This study used both content and frame analyses to test news-media representations of homelessness in The Courier-Mail newspaper for evidence of restricted journalism practice. Specifically, it sought signs of either direct manipulation of issue representation based on ideological grounds, and also evidence of news organisations prioritising low-cost news production over Public Sphere journalistic news values. The study found that news stories from the earlier parts of the longitudinal study showed stereotypical misrepresentations of homelessness for public deliberation which might be attributed to either, or both of the nominated restricting factors.

Science, media and the public – the framing of the bicycle helmet legislation debate in Australia: a newspaper content analysis.

Tessa Piper, Simon Willcox, Catriona Bonfiglioli, Adrian Emilsen, and Paul Martin

Research challenging assumptions about the value of bicycle helmets and the laws which make them mandatory recently triggered a media debate about bicycle helmet laws and prompted discussion as to the extent to which health behaviours should be legislated. This increased media coverage provided an opportunity to examine how the media frames this issue. A

Health reporting: the missing links.

Dr Trevor Cullen

Using press coverage of HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus) as a case study, the author argues that health communication theories, and in particular, Social Change Communication (SCC), can help to widen the framing of HIV journalism and health journalism by reporting the social, economic, cultural, religious and political determinants of health. These links could be applied to coverage of other communicable and non-communicable diseases.

Related articles

• Investigative Journalism : Four Corners Research (alanknight.wordpress.com)
• The Evolving Role of Journalists in the New Science-Media Ecosystem (bigthink.com)

But if its combined with good journalism fact checking, it can help create an unprecedented network of sources providing global reach, diversity and credibility.

Jess Hill, 28, is a reporter and producer at ABC Radio current affairs. Her Twitter site shows she’s following more than three thousand other chatters; a distinct contrast to celebrity journalists who talk more than they might appear to listen. She began using Twitter for reporting on the first day of the Libyan protests. Instead of trying to find people on conventional contact lists, she began putting messages out on Twitter asking,  “Does anyone in #….  know about… and then have a conversation back and forth” But how did she know the people she was chatting with were who they said they were?

Today, I am doing a story on a dissident newspaper that’s being printed and delivered around Damascus. I have been put in touch with a woman in the United States who says  she’s a member of the Syrian national council. So I interviewed her and then got in touch with two people the Guardian and the New York Times interviewed and said were members of the Syrian national council. I triangulated.

While social media helped dissidents get their message out, it also made it easier for security forces to identify dissidents who had revealed themselves on Facebook or Twitter.

Unless you are talking to people who use Twitter a lot and are being very transparent, the best thing is to take the safe route, take it off line and get their Skype account. That way you can just chat with them whenever. It’s much more informal and private.

Social media gave reporters the chance to check their sources in ways which were not available to journalists in the field.

If you are in the field and you are reporting a flood and you come across somebody who is knee deep in water and they tell you that they were also in Cyclone Tracy, you have no way of verifying that you have to take them at their word… In fact we had one case when this fellow wrote in and claimed his father a pathological liar who had never been in Darwin [for the cyclone]. In a way, the conversation about verification and social media is upside down. Social media is perhaps the best verification tool journalists have ever had. The number of sources that you can access in any given area, that may not be directly connected, enables you to triangulate in ways you can’t do on the ground. On Twitter you can do it. This blows the source field wide open.

Crowd sourcing could even be used to get accurate translations.

I organised the translation of  Saudi woman who drove and filmed herself and was then arrested. I crowd sourced translators ; a prominent Saudi woman blogger and then two other Arabic speakers. I fielded the first translation to a second person and then a third. It went through three translations to get a final one. And then I sent it back to the Saudi blogger to ask if it was right. She said, “Yes”. I don’t trust one person for anything. Not translations. Not source confirmation. It’s got to come from more than one person.

Twitter offered journalists more chances to immediately transmit news, even from within court rooms hearing complex and important cases. However, 24/7,  fast news was not novel to newsagency journalists. “Get It First, But First Get It Right” was the slogan of the International New Service (INS), founded by newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst in 1909. The slogan is cited in print from 1923. The INS combined with the United Press in 1958 to form United Press International (UPI). News agency journalists knew that writing a “snap”, an instant one sentence news story, was the most challenging task they faced.

Immediacy is so tempting. Journalists just grab for it without sometimes doing the checking they should do. While being first is something we are taught to do, with social media we have to be even more cautious than we have been in the past….Jess Hill

Gary Kemble

According to the ABC’s Social Media Co-ordinator, Gary Kemble, ABC News integrated  tweeting duties with the main news desk, so the people sending the tweets were the same people crafting the ABC News website. “With statistics showing that more and more people are finding their news via their social networks, it has become more important than ever to provide a relevant, timely social media service,” Kemble said. This integration had a number of benefits, he said:

Speed: rather than Twitter being the optional extra at the end of the process, it’s the first thing producers do in a breaking news situation. By having the senior producers send the tweets, there were minimal barriers between the audience and the news.

Engagement: because ABC producers were sending tweets, they’re also monitoring Twitter for breaking news, tip-offs and feedback. While @abcnews was not a ‘talkative’ account, we do respond to audience concerns over inaccuracies in our coverage.

Relevancy: sending tweets manually meant full control of what was sent, and could make full use of the medium by adding hashtags.

Human touch: people appreciated knowing there’s a real person behind the account. Each morning the ABC early producer sent a ‘Good morning’ tweet and these human touches made a difference.

Twitter can be used by reporters to :

• Identify and cultivate sources
• Verify information
• Maintain a continuim of reports on a major story
• Update fellow reporters
• Alert the audience to new developments
• Encourage interactivity
• Publicise reports
• Grow audience

News Corp's digitally altered front page

You could expect the Liberal National Party to be angry about MP Peter Slipper ignoring party orders and becoming Speaker of the Australian parliament. His switch was an embarrassment for the aggressive opposition leader, Tony Abbott, who until then, was confident he could force a new election.

But what of reporters at News Corporation dropping any pretense of objectivity and larding their reportage with  abuse worthy of a shock jock?

This week’s Sunday Mail, a Brisbane based News Corporation paper, carried the story, “How Labor lured Peter Slipper to Speaker’s chair in Federal Parliament” by Renee Viellaris, a senior writer.

THIS is the story of a political rodent, Labor’s political Pied Piper and a leader who stepped in his own rat trap.

Details on how Liberal National Party double-crosser Peter Slipper was groomed by the ALP to take on the role of Speaker in the nation’s Parliament can now be revealed….Renee Viellaris

Consider the extremity of the language. The article described a member of parliament as vermin, presumably fit to be exterminated. The journalist didn’t even bother attributing this ugly slur to a source; a common gambit deployed by politically inflamed correspondents. It was merely stated as fact. There could be no doubt the reporter disapproved of Slipper’s political decision.

Meanwhile, the metaphors were happily mixed to suggest the Labor Party “groomed” Slipper. Grooming, when applied to humans, is a term commonly used to describe paedophiles systematically preparing children for molestation. The image is re-inforced by a reference to the Pied Piper, a mythical trickster who charmed rats and abducted children.

This purple prose referred to a meeting between Slipper and Anthony Albanese, Labor’s Leader of the House of Representatives. In this context, the references were clearly inappropriate and intentionally offensive to both Slipper and Albanese.

Apart from the language, the story seemed to be a coherent analysis of Slipper’s defection. Could it be that Ms Viellaris had been embarrassed herself by the work of an anonymous sub-editor, seeking a more fevered pitch? Lets hope so, at least for the sake of her reputation.

Related articles

• Recriminations over Slipper continue (news.theage.com.au)

Police cordon off Wall Street

Twitter, Facebook, video streaming  and web sites are the  media weapons of choice of the Occupy Wall Street protesters. About a thousand people were today camped out in the Wall Street financial district in New York, demanding that the bankers who sparked the global economic crisis be brought to trial.

It was an all in protest. There was an African percussion band, old people, young people, punks with mohawks, native americans in suits, unionists, volunteer librarians running the people’s library, radical vegetarians and even a very strange man with crude tattoos and scars all over his visible body.

In the middle of the park, near the free food kitchen, they established a new media centre equipped with lap tops, digital cameras and recorders. Thorin Caristo was an organic farmer before he became a protest media spokesman.

“We definitely have a lot of upper echelon, over educated underpaid [people] coming out here,” he said.

The open air media centre

This media centre is right now processing video coming off the street. We have social networking happening on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and Youtube. At the same time, we also have a live stream happening where we are live filming everything.

“Someone co-ordinated,” he said, “but we are just lucky everyone are so damn smart”.

The website occupywallst.org provided background information, a forum, chat, live streaming links and even directions on how to get to the demonstration. (I had to ask a policeman.) The conversation on Twitter could be found at Twitter.com/occupywallstnyc. The live stream was at Livestream.com/occupywallstnyc. A new site was called occupyeverything.org.

Thorin Caristo

“That’s an up and coming one,” Caristo said.

People are being defined by what they are producing themselves. This is redefining media.

Did they need mainstream media to carry their message?

Not any more.

Occupy Wall Street is a horizontally organized resistance movement employing the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic “to restore democracy in America”. It uses a tool known as a “people’s assembly” to facilitate collective decision making in an open, participatory and non-binding manner. It calls it  the NYC General Assembly and “welcomes people from all colors, genders and beliefs” to attend  daily assemblies.

Columbia, based in New York, said the program aimed to help redefine journalism in a fast-changing digital media environment. Graduates could be employed as a:

• Online editor/manager of information technology at a large news organization
• Data-mining expert for journalistic applications and investigative journalism
• Entrepreneur/founder of media startup
• Web designer for news site

Columbia has about 230  students enrolled in its one year Master of Science (Journalism)  program. The new journalism/computer science degree had its first intake in August, with three of the first five students coming from China.

Yang Sui

Yang Sui began at Columbia in Computer Science before joining the joint degree. He said he wanted to be “tactical and resourcesful at the same time”.

I want to know what’s really going on in newsrooms and know the technical requirements and be able to talk to the technical people. I want to be able to say, “Hey this is what we can do and this is what we can’t do”, to find alternative ways to solve problems, to fill out the gap between the editorial side and technology.

“The traditonal technology [people] don’t interact with the editorial team,” he said.   The joint degree was much more practical.

Shujian Bu

Shujian Ju, from Nanjing, studied electrical engineering in her undergraduate degree. “Columbia is so nice,” she said. “Everyone knows that as a journalism school it’s the best”. Shujian had interned in major newspapers in China and realised, she said, that the press systems were very different to the United States. But she hoped to take what she had learned in the US back home.

I am always thinking of going back to China to do some real journalism. I am thinking about forming a new company and opening a new newspaper. The media market in China is opening up and the press has more voices.

Professor Turner chaired the 2009 review of Excellence in Research Australia which allowed Non Traditional Research Outcomes (eg journalism and creative writing) to be recognised by the Australian Research Council.

Traditional research had “off the rack” methods of research assessment, he said.

Developing disciplines needed to indicate that professional practices showed a research component.

Much of the creative material submitted for the 2010 review was of widely different standards. Some submissions “Didn’t have a hope in Hell of being accepted,” he said.

There was a mixed message sent out which implied that everything that everybody did that was professional or creative practice would be included. Not true! Only some under certain circumstances…Some people were putting in literally hundreds of pieces for assessment.

In contrast in one (hypothetical) case, a hopeful academic had submitted a flyer for a concert as evidence.

The ARC required that each Non Traditional Research Output submitted be accompanied by a mini exegesis, which outlined its significance. The process of writing this exegesis might serve as a test as to whether an item qualified.

The research statement for NTROs to be submitted for peer review in ERA 2012, can be found at Appendix C (page 75) of the ERA 2012 Submission Guidelines. The guidelines are available for download at http://www.arc.gov.au/pdf/era12/ERA2012_SubmissionGuidelines.pdf.

Professor Turner gave this speech  in Sydney on 15.9.11 at a conference organised by University of Technology Sydney. The conference was staged with the support of Professor Lesley Farrell and the research office of the Faculty of Arts and Science. A slightly edited version of his speech can be heard on the Soundcloud link which follows:

But perhaps thats because we get much of our international news from the United States where there appear to be genuine problems with the big newspaper groups whose revenue underpinned much of its quality news. These rather gloomy stories are spread by mainstream news  distribution systems which still inform many globalised discussions.

Reports of the death of Australian newspapers were premature, according to The Newspaper Works. The State of Australian Newspapers 2011, published by Newspaper Works, claimed that Australian newspaper revenue had bounced back by 6% in 2010 after a big decline caused by the Global Financial Crisis.

Australia’s Newspaper Works CEO, Tony Hale, said Australia was doing much better, in circulation figures and revenue,  than the US and Europe. Citing the OECD The Evolution of News and the Internet Report, Hale said that while Australian newspapers had recorded a 3% market decline between 2007 and 2009, Britain had experienced 21% negative growth and the US 30%.

Australia had two paid for national dailies, ten metropolitan paid for newspapers and 36 paid regional and local dailies. There were ten Sunday newspapers. There were also three free metropolitan dailies.

Australia doesn’t have the population the US does so there are quite discrete markets and less competition within those markets…The two big metropolitan markets, Sydney and Melbourne, have two newspapers competing very heavily against each other, but the other metropolitan markets only have one [newspaper]. They have quite tidy markets.

Australian newspapers were also heavily diversified. The dominant group, News Corporation, had interests in:

• newspapers
• movies
• television
• cable
• satellite TV
• marketing
• publishing

Ironically, Rupert Murdoch’s takeover of much of the Australian mainstream press in 1987, had resulted highly profitable newspapers, unhindered by competition. This had insulated much of the press against economic downturns and the impact of the internet on revenue.

There’s been great confidence by the publishers to invest heavily in newspapers. In  both print and online formats the newspaper industry is in very solid shape. Metropolitan, regional and community papers often have colour throughout, [specialist] sections, and high gloss inserts. This has enabled them to retain readers and service the advertising market.

Newspapers dominated online news services. They had also moved  into tablet and smartphone applications. Seven of the top ten news websites in Australia, were newspaper publishers, Hale claimed.

Tony Hale, CEO Newspaper Works

However, the strongest growth in newspaper advertising growth was predicted to take place in the new economic powerhouses, India, Russia, China and Brazil. India, the largest English language press in the world, was expected to increase by almost 15% in 2011, compared to Australia’s slight decline of .3%. “As literacy increases and the middle classes emerge in those countries, newspaper growth can be expected to be strong,” Hale said. “It would be good to be part of the industry there,” he said.

The Newspaper Works is a non profit body established by the Australian newspaper industry, to promote newspapers as “a powerful and influential medium for advertisers”.

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