A number of studies have examined why students choose to study journalism at university, but overall, this area is still relatively underexplored. Yet, understanding why students choose journalism, and what career expectations they hold, is important not only for educators but also for wider society and public debates about the future of journalism and the value of tertiary journalism education. This article examines the motivations of 1884 Australian journalism students enrolled across 10 universities. It finds that hopes for a varied lifestyle and opportunities to express their creativity are the most dominant motivations among students. Public service ideals are somewhat less important, while financial concerns and fame are least important. These motivations also find expression in students' preferred areas of specialisation (referred to in Australia as rounds): lifestyle rounds are far more popular than politics and business rounds or science and development rounds.
This article follows on from a discussion by Richards (2010) about ethics committees and journalism researchers being ‘uneasy bedfellows’. It argues that there is scope for research using journalism as a methodology to be approved by Human Research Ethics Committees (HRECs), while acknowledging that work needs to be done in familiarising journalism academics with the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research (2007) and HRECs with journalism as a research methodology. The issues that arise as journalism academics and HRECs meet tend to focus on the requirement of informed consent and timing problems, but these are not insurmountable and there are clauses in Australia’s National Statement that provide scope for exemptions from these requirements. This article includes input from an interview with Professor Colin Thomson, one of the members of the NHMRC/ARC/UA working party that drafted the 2007 revision of the National Statement, clarifying the intentions of the authors with regard to Fourth Estate research, by journalists, as well as by researchers from the fields of business, law and politics. It also highlights the points of contention and common confusions that frequently arise and suggests ways that journalism academics can act collaboratively to change the current status quo.
This article examines the extent to which data journalism (DJ) is being taught in Australian universities. It presents the results of interviews with 35 journalism academics about how they are incorporating data journalism into their courses. It includes details about the types of data journalism skills they are teaching, the resources they are using and the hindrances that have met or are making it difficult to teach data journalism. These hindrances include low and varied levels of quantitative literacy and math aversion among students, lack of time for upskilling and limited room in their courses for new material. The study found that at least nine Australian universities have semester-long units dedicated to data journalism and that at least a further nine are teaching it via some lectures and activities. Almost all respondents thought more should be done to incorporate data journalism into the curricula. This article lays a foundation for future exploration of how data journalism could be incorporated into journalism programmes where the staff requires upskilling.
This article continues an ongoing investigation into the problems that contemporary researchers in Australia using journalism as a methodology face in meeting the bureaucratic requirements of Human Research Ethics Committees (HRECs). This discussion in the peer-reviewed literature includes Richards (2009), Turner (2011), Lindgren and Phillips (2011), Romano (2012) and two articles by the author (Davies 2011a, 2011b). These two articles explored the flexibility built into the HREC’s guiding document, the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research, in 2007 in order to make it possible for research that does not fit the standard scientific model to gain timely approval. The professional discussion has also included public conversations at the Journalism Education Association of Australia (JEAA) annual conferences and on the organisation’s online discussion list. It is evident from these discussions that some researchers find the ethics application process sufficiently arduous that research using journalism as a methodology is effectively not possible for them. Meanwhile, others find the approval process to be painless and beneficial to their work. This raises the question of whether these differences are due to the researchers’ competence in lodging applications for approvals, or differences in the approach taken by the various university-based HRECs. The novel contribution of this article to the discussion is quantitative data illustrating the diversity of approaches taken by HRECs to applications regarding research using journalism as a methodology and reflection on the implications for investigative journalism.
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.
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