{"title":"Journalism Education in New Zealand: Its History, Current Challenges and Possible Futures","authors":"Grant Hannis","doi":"10.1177/1326365X17728823","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1326365X17728823","url":null,"abstract":"Vocational journalism education in New Zealand is facing the twin challenges of declining student numbers and increasing industry expectations that graduates should have strong multimedia skills. The main reason for both is the digital revolution, which has created a public perception that there are no longer jobs for new journalists and increased demand from industry for recruits proficient in convergent journalism. Some journalism schools, unable to meet these challenges, have closed. This article considers what the remaining schools are doing to meet the challenges. The article also reports the results of a survey of graduates of the oldest continuously operating journalism school in the country. The results reveal how the nature of journalism education in New Zealand has changed over the past 50 years, the experience of the graduates since leaving the school and the advice they offer today’s aspiring journalists.","PeriodicalId":43557,"journal":{"name":"Asia Pacific Media Educator","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1326365X17728823","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41587912","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Supporting International Student Mobility Through Resourced International Internships","authors":"A. Wake, M. Sison, Rilke Muir","doi":"10.1177/1326365X17728830","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1326365X17728830","url":null,"abstract":"Higher education students are increasingly being encouraged by governments and their universities to participate in global mobility activities, and yet historically few received appropriate preparation, reporting that they had inadequate knowledge of the country and the industries to which they were headed. This article discusses the result of a student-centred research-led project which resulted in the creation of resources for communications students undertaking solo international mobility activities. In particular, we discuss the ‘Global Work Ready’ project developed in an Australian university for communications students headed predominately to Asia. Using iterative participatory action research, a website was designed to improve preparation and outcomes for students. The resources were developed after in-depth interviews with 14 former international interns, three host employers and a cross-university team of staff interested in global education. The focus is on providing information and advice for students before, during and after their internship, much of it in the students’ own words. Combined with links to relevant university services and resources, the Global Work Ready website provides a template for resources for students that can save staff hours of one-to-one advice and support and enables students to access relevant information as and when they are ready for it.","PeriodicalId":43557,"journal":{"name":"Asia Pacific Media Educator","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1326365X17728830","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42102226","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Underreporting ‘Bout a Revolution: A Historical–Comparative Study Exploring Major Newspaper Coverage of Disability Rights in a Revolutionary Context (1980–2017)","authors":"Damian Mellifont","doi":"10.1177/1326365X17728826","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1326365X17728826","url":null,"abstract":"The disability rights movement has grown considerably. Recognizing that this international movement has travelled largely under the media radar, it nevertheless remains important to explore how this phenomenon has been reported upon over recent decades. Applying historical–comparative and thematic analysis methods to a sample of 16 major newspaper texts published between 1980 and 2017 and obtained via a ProQuest Historical Newspaper database search, as supplemented by eight journal articles retrieved from a Google Scholar search, this exploratory study reveals three key messages. These messages should be of particular interest to newspaper editors, journalists and disability activists around the globe. First, despite a general shortage of major newspaper reporting about the disability rights revolution, progressive themes of activism, legislation, technology and economic participation principles were identified. Second, the ethical reporting of disability rights in a revolutionary context offers opportunities for journalists to move away from disempowering stereotypes. Finally, journalists need to be more prepared to investigate and report about disability rights, the challenges experienced by many people with disabilities, as well as community-endorsed, evidence-based ways forward.","PeriodicalId":43557,"journal":{"name":"Asia Pacific Media Educator","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1326365X17728826","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41958102","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Pass the Source—Journalism’s Confidentiality Bane in the Face of Legislative Onslaughts","authors":"Joseph M. Fernandez","doi":"10.1177/1326365X17728822","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1326365X17728822","url":null,"abstract":"‘Journalism under siege’ proclaimed the cover of The Walkley Magazine, an Australian publication dedicated to promoting journalism excellence in its March 2017 issue. This headline reflects the severe disruption journalism is experiencing globally. Facts used to be facts and news was news but now we have ‘alternative facts’ and ‘fake news’ (Media Watch, 2017). Against this backdrop, a persistent dilemma for journalism has been the impact of the law on journalists relying on confidential sources who play a critical part in providing access to information. The journalism profession’s apparent source protection gains have been undermined by legislative and other assaults, and it has had a chilling effect on journalists’ contacts with confidential sources. The Australian journalists’ union, the Media Alliance, has warned that ‘it is only a matter of time’ before a journalist is convicted for refusing to disclose a confidential source (Murphy, 2017, p. 3). This article builds on earlier work examining how Australian journalists are coping in their dealings with confidential sources. This article (a) reports on the findings from an Australian study into journalists’ confidential sources and (b) identifies lessons and reform potentials arising from these findings.","PeriodicalId":43557,"journal":{"name":"Asia Pacific Media Educator","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1326365X17728822","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44924622","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Kayt Davies, A. Dodd, C. Kremmer, Margaret Van Heekeren
{"title":"The Pedagogy of the UniPollWatch Pop-up Journalism Project","authors":"Kayt Davies, A. Dodd, C. Kremmer, Margaret Van Heekeren","doi":"10.1177/1326365X17728819","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1326365X17728819","url":null,"abstract":"The journalism schools at 28 Australian universities joined forces to provide coverage of the 2016 federal election. The UniPollWatch (UPW) 2016 project was the biggest collaborative university journalism project ever undertaken in Australia. UPW reflects several trends in journalism education. It exemplifies teamwork and embodies the most authentic aspects of experiential learning and industry engagement. In so doing, it boldly asserts that the academy and journalism schools can—and should—provide high quality reportage for the benefit of general audiences. While UPW first set out to provide a ‘teaching hospital’ style venue for real world publication of student work, its pop-up online nature imbued it with potential to meet the aims of more recent best practice models of journalism education. The participating universities were free to decide how they engaged their students with the project, what content they wanted to create for it and how they wanted to prepare and debrief their students. Some offered it as a voluntary extra-curricular activity, while others embedded it in courses and made the work compulsory and assessed, some used it as a minor assessment and others dedicated whole units to it. This article details the variety of teaching methods employed by the different participating universities, using a framework of the pedagogical models applied to contemporary journalism education.","PeriodicalId":43557,"journal":{"name":"Asia Pacific Media Educator","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1326365X17728819","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43084738","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Belated Submission to the Select Committee on the Future of Public Interest Journalism","authors":"J. Vine","doi":"10.1177/1326365X17728829","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1326365X17728829","url":null,"abstract":"Submissions to this year’s Select Committee on the Future of Public Interest Journalism pointed out that journalism tertiary education—students under the guidance of experienced and well-respected journalism practitioners—is in a position to help revive investigative and civic journalism. As Edith Cowan’s Kayt Davies (2014) pointed out as far back as 2014, public interest journalism practised in tertiary journalism programmes could potentially be funded through bodies such as the Australian Research Council (ARC) and the research grants system. Such revenue sources not only transcend the business model but also exist at a relatively acceptable arm’s length from the government. However, research—journalism or otherwise—is ineligible for ARC funding without academic research ethics committee approval. Unfortunately, the process of applying for approval from a committee, whose terms of reference are guided by an academy-approved, government-developed document (i.e., the National Statement), is so offensive to journalistic ideology that it renders the whole concept of public interest journalism in the university sector untenable. This essay examines the National Statement and draws similarities between its values and beliefs and professional journalism ideology (as articulated by the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA), the Australian Press Council, the Dart Centre for Journalism and Trauma and the Hunter Institute for Mental Health). It then explores inbuilt flexibilities in the National Statement that offer journalism as a research methodology, a means of maintaining its independence. It then finishes with an updated survey of how journalism programmes around Australia negotiate the conflict between academic research ethics and professional ideology while engaging in practice-based research. In short, this essay explores options for the revival of public interest journalism that are acceptable to both academy and journalism sensibilities.","PeriodicalId":43557,"journal":{"name":"Asia Pacific Media Educator","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1326365X17728829","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41404757","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
S. Order, L. Murray, J. Prince, J. Hobson, S. Freitas
{"title":"Remixing Creativity in Learning and Learning of Creativity: A Case Study of Audio Remix Practice with Undergraduate Students","authors":"S. Order, L. Murray, J. Prince, J. Hobson, S. Freitas","doi":"10.1177/1326365X17728827","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1326365X17728827","url":null,"abstract":"Testing creativity in tertiary learning activities is a young field of research, and current assessment methods are difficult to apply within the diverse context of media production education, where disciplines range from journalism through to video game production. However, the concept of remix is common across this wide range of media, and offers practitioners ‘endless hybridizations in language, genre, content, technique and the like’ (Knobel & Lankshear, 2008, p. 22). The conceptual commonality of remix indicates that the study conclusions will have useful implications across a range of media production disciplines. This study aims to consider new methods for testing creativity in media production learning activities and to provide better assessments for learning design. This study focused upon a learner cohort of music technology students that were undertaking a work-integrated learning programme with a record label. To make the students more work-ready and inspire greater creativity, they remixed tracks recorded by professional music artists as part of a unit assessment. Subsequent self-report surveys (N = 29) found that the process of creating a ‘remix’ enhanced their creativity and provided suggested improvements to the design of the learning experience. Importantly, we found no relationship between the survey responses and objective assessments, indicating that the self-reported improvements in creativity were not simply a measure of how well the students performed the formally assessed tasks. Although more research is needed to establish effective measures of creativity, these findings demonstrate that self-report survey tools can be a powerful tool for measuring creativity and supporting improved iterative learning design.","PeriodicalId":43557,"journal":{"name":"Asia Pacific Media Educator","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1326365X17728827","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45556854","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Asserting Journalistic Autonomy in the ‘Post-truth’ Era of ‘Alternative Facts’: Lessons from Reporting on the Orations of a Populist Leader","authors":"A. Romano","doi":"10.1177/1326365X17704287","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1326365X17704287","url":null,"abstract":"A current challenge for journalists is how to report on post-truth political discourse in an era when the statements of populist leaders are increasingly characterized by emotionalism, out-of-context use of verifiable facts, euphemisms and double speak. A case study of the much-reported maiden speech by populist leader Pauline Hanson to the Australian Senate in 2016 is used to identify trends and patterns in stories that resulted from her oration. The case study findings were used to distil nine recommendations for journalists about how to research and report on statements by high-profile political and opinion leaders who peddle suspected alternative facts and post-truth logic. The findings indicate a need for journalists to reassert their autonomy over storytelling agendas through decoding post-truth discourse to identify underlying news issues, then applying rigour in certain fundamentals of fact checking, information sourcing, framing and backgrounding of stories. The case study findings have international relevance because the politics and media-management strategies of Hanson and her One Nation party replicate those of populist opinion leaders in the United States, United Kingdom and many other countries.","PeriodicalId":43557,"journal":{"name":"Asia Pacific Media Educator","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1326365X17704287","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43150125","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Contextualizing Fake News in Post-truth Era: Journalism Education in India","authors":"Harikrishnan Bhaskaran, Harsh Mishra, P. Nair","doi":"10.1177/1326365X17702277","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1326365X17702277","url":null,"abstract":"The current debate on fake-news is heavily focused on American and British post-truth politics and the tactical use of ‘alternative facts’. However, the concerns about the impact of fake news on journalism are not restricted to European and American contexts only. This commentary attempts to examine journalism practice and training in India in the post-truth era. Unlike the issues projected in the American debate on the need to reengage and empathize with the non-elite audience and the rise of a fact-checking culture, the apprehensions appear to be slightly different in other countries. In India, tackling the post-truth era challenges is also about addressing obstructive institutional forces like inactive regulatory bodies and out-dated curricula in University-based journalism programmes. The commentary argues that Indian journalism educators should focus on formulating a dynamic curriculum framework that integrates collaborative verification practices with an emphasis on reengaging with the audience to address the enigmatic post-truth politics in the country.","PeriodicalId":43557,"journal":{"name":"Asia Pacific Media Educator","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1326365X17702277","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42253607","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}