- Title
- Putting the "i" into journalism education: the why and the how of the re-working of the journalism curriculum at the University of Newcastle
- Creator
- Koutsoukos, Christina; Biggins, Felicity
- Relation
- Australian and New Zelaand Communication Association Conference 2010: Media, Democracy and Change (ANZCA 2010). Media, Democracy and Change: Refereed Proceedings of the Australian and New Zelaand Communication Association Conference 2010 (Canberra, A.C.T. 7-9 July, 2010)
- Relation
- http://www.canberra.edu.au/anzca2010/conference-proceedings/table-of-contents
- Publisher
- ANZCA
- Resource Type
- conference paper
- Date
- 2010
- Description
- In a provocative and timely essay, Picard (2009) contended journalists must “adapt or die”; they can no longer do what they have always done. He also suggested that journalists deserve low pay because “wages are compensation for value creation” and “journalists simply aren’t creating much value these days”. The migration of advertising to online publications and the fragmentation of the mass audience—occurring inside a global financial crisis—have perhaps forever decimated heritage commercial media and industrial journalism. Websites such as newspaperdeathwatch.com provide regular obituaries for broadsheets and tabloids in the advanced industrial societies, while claiming that the death of the newspaper will provide for the rebirth of journalism; but what sort of journalism? The journalists no longer control “the story” that was always part of a newspaper or a bulletin (Marsh, 2009). “Search engines and news aggregators have ripped that bundle apart.” The audience wants in. So what skills will practitioners require and how can that be reflected in the university curriculum? This paper examines and analyses the process of the re-design of the journalism major at the University of Newcastle in 2009. It asks: what skills will students need to enter this brave new world of digital journalism? What does the changing value of journalism mean for graduates entering the field? It also considers the risks of making assumptions about students’ level of technical engagement and their career aspirations. The re-design must recognise that few students will work as industrial journalists, confined to a single medium. They will need to be multi-skilled and able to work across multiple platforms in a converged media industry. So, just what should students be learning? Is the medium the message? Should academic staff be Facebooking their students’ feedback and twittering their marks, or marking their Facebooks and giving feedback on their twitters?
- Subject
- journalism education; journalism curriculum; digital journalism; media industry; University of Newcastle, (NSW)
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/933419
- Identifier
- uon:11623
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781740883191
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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