Digital Commons Network^™

Building Bridges: Enlightening Foreign Correspondents Through The Virtual Classroom, N. D'Entremont, E. Dougall

Asia Pacific Media Educator

Currently, no model exists for providing lifelong learning opportunities to foreign correspondents. This paper provides a rationale and framework for the development of a foreign correspondent's Internet learning network model which could facilitate structured and semi-structured professional development opportunities. In this context, a discussion of the literature in relation to lifelong learning, the virtual classroom and computer-mediated communication is provided. Sustained exposure to and participation in such a network would provide foreign correspondents with opportunities to enhance their cultural knowledge, sensitivity and perspective and could provide support to what is often a socially, culturally and personally isolating role.

We Just Live Our Own Lives Here ... In The Pacific, M. Quanchi

Asia Pacific Media Educator

To state that the mostly rural population of Pacific Islanders spread across 22 nations and hundreds of language and cultural groups are "just living their own lives", acknowledging but not greatly affected by geo-politics and globalisation, is a reasonable assertion. This phrase is borrowed from Geua Dekure of Koiari in PNG when interviewed for the book Views from interviews: the changing role of women in Papua New Guinea. Geua acknowledged that missions, colonial rule and independence had affected her people, but she noted that "we just live our own lives here ... we recognise each other's strengths and traditional knowledge. …

Trouble In Paradise: Hawaii's Newspaper Crisis, M. Jones

Asia Pacific Media Educator

For decades, The Honolulu Advertiser has fought a circulation war with its principal rival, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. Both papers are circulated mainly on the island of Oahu, the most populated and developed of the Hawaiian islands that contains the state capital and most of Hawaii's tourist hotels. Examining both of these newspapers reveals a format that is typical of American regional dailies: halfway between a tabloid and a broadsheet in their size, design and editorial approach. The papers contain a mixture of local news generated by their own news staff combined with international news from agency feeds and syndicated columns …

Editorial: In This Issue: Foreign Correspondents In Asia-Pacific, A. Romano

Asia Pacific Media Educator

The allure of reporting the distant and the exotic has been long acknowledged. Even in Elizabethan times, Shakespeare had Othello enrapture Desdemona with what might be considered a form of foreign correspondency, spinning stories of his travels. In describing how he first enthralled her, he explains:

I spake of most disastrous chances,
Of moving accidents by flood and field,
Of hair-breadth 'scapes i' the imminent deadly breaches ...
Rough quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads touch heaven.
(Othello I, 3)

The glamour and prestige attached to reporting from foreign climes persists in the modern-day news industry. Journalists hold "an almost …

Book Review: Foreign Devils And Other Journalists, S. Woods

Asia Pacific Media Educator

Kingsbury, Damien, Loo, Eric& Payne,Patricia (eds), (2000).
Foreign Devils and Other journalists
Monash Papers on Southeast Asia #52 Clayton, Vic.: Monash Asia Institute. ISBN 0 7326 1183 0

Reviewed by Shelley Woods

This new offering from the Monash Asia Institute is a meaningful collection of thoughtful research on a very important aspect of the formulation of the Australian world view; in particular, how we view our regional neighbours (and they us), and how those views are formed through the news media prism. As the editors note in their introduction, this collection explores some of the more prominent media issues concerning …

From Journalism School To Newsroom: What Rite Of Passage?, B. Josephi

Asia Pacific Media Educator

Professional education does not stop at the college gate. The student then enters the organizational framework of a media institution, which provides its own lasting formative experience. By example of recently graduated journalists at an Australian metropolitan newspaper, the West Australian, this article traces the young journalists' induction process into the paper's newsroom workings and explores the adjustments they made after becoming part of an organisational unit. The qualitative interviews show that the newsroom is experienced as a very different eninronment from whatever simplified version may have encountered at journalism school. The newly afforded responsibility of writing for thousands of …

Knighted In Their Profession: How Foreign Correspondents Are Selected By Australian Press, J. Schauble

Asia Pacific Media Educator

The preparation of newspaper correspondents for postings overseas has always been an inexact business. A decade ago it was suggested that such jobs were more likely doled out as a reward for services rendered or as a means of dealing with a problem within the domestic newsroom. There appears to be little evidence that this situation has changed. Given that the number of postings overseas is shrinking and the commitment of publishers to maintaining discrete foreign bureaus appears static, the low priority given to the training and education of correspondents is hardly surprising. There are signs, however, that journalism education …

Journalism And Trauma: Proposals For Change, P. Castle

Asia Pacific Media Educator

I feel I have to give some humanity to those terrible people, journalists, who go out and report on all the awful events that happen around us. Journalists have often been depicted as people who have little empathy or emotions when dealing with the tragedies they report about. Little has changed in news content over the years, but what has to change is the way journalists are treated by their employers when they report on trauma. My concern about this topic has been long term and my pursuing this area of post-graduate study reflects this. In 1986 the Australian Journalists …

Foreign Correspondent Web Site And Discussion Group, B. Weaver

Asia Pacific Media Educator

I created the Foreign Correspondent web site (www.uq.edu.au/ jrn/fc/) in December 1998, at the request of Anna Day from the Department of Journalism at the University of Queensland. Anna had been corresponding with an international collection of foreign correspondents and academics, coordinating their discussions via an email list. The list was not automated, however, and the group had no Web presence. It was felt that a Web page which focused on sites and tools relevant to foreign correspondence would be a useful resource for group members and a means of announcing and publicising the group and its activities to a …

Internet Resources For Foreign Correspondents, S. Quinn

Asia Pacific Media Educator

Digital technologies mean that foreign correspondents have a new range of tools to help them do their job better. Some of the tools -- the satellite dish and the mobile telephone for example -- help journalists get their stories back to base more quickly. Others such as the Internet help reporters gather information more efficiently. This article lists Internet tools and sites that foreign correspondents can use.

Agency Source Influence On Television Reporting: Case Of Mururoa And Tahiti, C. A. Paterson

Asia Pacific Media Educator

Broadcasters globally are dependent on the commercial news agency wholesalers of television pictures. By following the chronological development of a story, this article demonstrates how framing determined in agency planning processes influences the stories told to audiences by broadcasters. It is hypothesised that news agency economic priorities drive international event coverage planning; that news-coverage "frames" influence the news delivered to agency clients and the stories told to audiences by broadcasters; and that wealthy broadcasters are more likely to localise their coverage of international events, while smaller broadcasters relay to their audiences strictly the stories told by agencies. The case of …

Reporting From Imperial Frontiers: The Making Of Foreign Correspondents A Century Apart, C. A. Vaughan

Asia Pacific Media Educator

Changing markets and political and technological circumstances have altered both the likelihood and mode of reporting from foreign shore. Based on the author’s media experience and research into the background of the first American foreign correspondent in the Philippines, this article offers a historical perspective of two geographically and thematically linked forays in the field of international reporting.

Fair Game Or Fair Go? Impact Of News Reporting On Victims And Survivors Of Traumatic Events, T. Mclellan

Asia Pacific Media Educator

When traumatic incidents occur, victims and survivors – as well as their families, friends and immediate communities – respond in varying ways. Over the past century, however, researchers have mapped common psychosocial consequences for victims/survivors in their studies of what has come to be known as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Over the same period, journalists and news media managers have adopted local, medium-specific and industry-wide journalistic standards for acceptable ethical and operational behaviours when it comes to covering such incidents. Yet, despite numerous prescriptive codes – and growing public criticism – Australia’s news media continues to confront victims/ survivors in …

Reporting War And Conflict, P. Cole-Adams

Asia Pacific Media Educator

Let me begin with a cautionary tale. Back in March 1901, a couple of months after the birth of Australian federation, a bloke called William Lambie – the correspondent whom The Age had sent to South Africa to cover the Boer War – achieved a remarkable but unenviable distinction. He became not only the first Australian war correspondent to be killed in the line of duty, but the first Victorian, military or civilian, to be killed in that ugly conflict. According to an Australian colleague, one A.G. (Smiler) Hales, who was reporting for the London Daily News, he and Lambie …

Friendship And Objectivity: Pros And Cons Of Foreign Correspondents' Adoption Of The Insiders' Perspective, E. Hodge

Asia Pacific Media Educator

With credit for some of the subjects from my generalist Bachelor of Arts from the University of Newcastle, I completed a BA with honours in Indonesian and Malayan Studies from the University of Sydney in the late 1960s, graduating in 1970. The honours course at Sydney University in those days included a thorough grounding in the history, sociology, literature and languages of the Indonesian archipelago and the Malayan peninsula. We learned about their pre-colonial history, colonial history, modern history, ethnic makeup, cultures, religions, literatures, Bahasa Indonesia (literally the Indonesian language) and Bahasa Melayu (Malay). Although we were taught spoken Indonesian …

Port Arthur Massacre: A Tv Editor's Experience, R. Lower

Asia Pacific Media Educator

On 28 April 1996, a gunman armed with two high-calibre, semiautomatic weapons shot dead 35 people, injured 18 and attempted to kill a further 20 in Port Arthur, a former penal settlement and popular tourist destination in Tasmania, Australia. He then attempted to burn down a bed-and-breakfast cottage, the Seascape Cottage, belonging to two of his victims, apparently in an attempt to kill himself. Police arrested a 29-year-old man, Martin Bryant, who was tried in Hobart’s Supreme Court on 72 criminal charges, including 35 counts of murder. Tasmania’s Chief Justice William Cox sentenced Bryant to imprisonment for the term of …

Covering Catastrophe In Papua New Guinea, S. Dorney

Asia Pacific Media Educator

Five days after getting out the first news to the world of Papua New Guinea’s catastrophic tidal wave – the tsunami that killed more than 2000 people in and around the Sissino Lagoon west of Aitape in July 1998 – I broke down uncontrollably and wept. Sitting with my hands on my knees and my head bowed in the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC’s) Port Moresby radio studio, I cried solidly for, I suspect, at least five minutes. I was alone. It was shortly after half past six on a Thursday morning, and I had just completed a regular weekly, 10-minute …

Medialink: New Program To Promote Asia-Australia Media Exchange, S. Downie

Asia Pacific Media Educator

The Asialink Center at The University of Melbourne has established a new media program, Medialink, to link media in the Asia-Australia region through information and personnel exchanges. Part of the program will see Australian media workers and students working in Asian news organizations and vice versa.
Medialink was launched in Melbourne in December by Indonesian editor Mr Gunawan Mohamad, founder and editor of the news magazine Tempo which was banned in 1994but defied the government by going on-line until it was allowed to resume publishing in 1998. "We should not underestimate the importance of exchanges. Creating this exchange program is …

Book Review: Radio Happy Isles: Media And Politics At Play In The Pacific, R. Phillipps

Asia Pacific Media Educator

Seward, Robert (1999)
Radio Happy Isles: Media and Politics at Play in the Pacific,
University of Hawai'i Press, Honolulu. 236 pp. ISBN 0-8248 2014-2

Reviewed by Richard Phillipps

Now he lives in Tokyo and New York,but readers of Radio Happy Isles get the impression that Robert Seward would rather be doing what he did when he researched this book: meandering across the Pacific, listening to local radio wherever he went. He recorded broadcasts, sat in newsrooms, met the people who ran the stations and those who listened. These are the island stations where personal paid messages (like classifieds in newspapers) …

Bad News About Palm Island? Press Accounts Of An Indigenous Community, J. M. Selby

Asia Pacific Media Educator

In this commentary I examine some of the inevitable relational complexities (Selby 1999)between those who represent and who they are. I take these complexities to be central in defining an appropriate space for understanding newspaper representations of Australian indigenous communities, in this case tropical Palm Island, a community of 3,000 people. In this space we find the editors, freelance and waged journalists, letter writers and the different members and groups on Palm Island. Here I also find myself and my relationship to the communities under question, including, the community of journalists.

Animal Rehabilitationan Exercise In The Practice Of Biodiversity And A Tool For Conservation, Gisela Kaplan

Animal Issues

On a recent trip that I took to town, the roads were deserted and a family of woodducks was walking near the edge of the road. Ten minutes later I returned and one dead woodduck was in the middle of the road. As ducks generally walk slowly across the road, it was easy to assume that the driver of a car had, maliciously, failed to slow down for them. The driver had further failed to stop after hitting the duck, not knowing perhaps that the whole family would gather around the dead one and thereby risk death from other reckless …

Review Essay: Species Of Mind - The Philosophy And Biology Of Cognitive Ethology, Paul Redding

Animal Issues

In Species of Mind, Colin Allen, a philosopher, and Marc Bekoff, an ethologist, defend and sketch out suggestions for a ‘cognitive ethology’, a discipline bringing the fruits of the cognitive revolution in psychology to the field of ethology. When one reads in the preface their description of this projected discipline as involving a ‘comparative, evolutionary, and ecological study of animal thought processes, beliefs, rationality, information processing, and consciousness’ (p. ix), one gets an immediate sense of the ambitiousness of the project as well as the range of opposing views with which it will have to engage.

Book Notes, Conference Announcement, Index, Denise Russell

Animal Issues

Book Notes, Conference Announcement, Index to issues.

Whither Rights? Animal Rights And The Rise Of New Welfarism, Nicola Taylor

Animal Issues

The notion of an animal rights movement is one which has the potential to mislead since those fighting for animals come from a variety of different ideological backgrounds and advocate many different ways to achieve many different aims. Gary Francione1 argues that animal rights have become subsumed in what he terms ‘new welfarism’. New welfarism is a hybrid approach which advocates more ‘traditional’ welfarist aims in the short term with the ultimate goal being one of animal rights and animal liberation in the long term. It is a sort of ‘crisis management’ whereby initial welfare problems are dealt with on …

In What Respects, If Any, Should The Primates Be Equal?, Elizabeth Murphy

Animal Issues

Human beings are undoubtedly blessed with the most extraordinary gift of nature—the most sophisticated consciousness. However, it is also this superb awareness which shackles some Homo sapiens with an abject humiliation - an irrational horror of their animality. The human animals’ realisation of their biological, hence finite, condition can impel them to fearfully disclaim their ancestry and strive to 'transcend' their natural condition. The human species' claim to superior physical and moral status in the natural world on the basis of either their 'unique' rationality, dignity or worth, is specious. Traditional western philosophical, religious, scientific and literary ideologies have initiated …

Book Reviews, Denise Russell, Suzanne Frazer, Celia Roberts, Felicity Sutcliffe

Animal Issues

Ethical approaches to animal-based science: Proceedings of the Joint ANZCCART/NAEAC Conference held in Auckland, New Zealand, 19-20 September, 1977, v + 159pp, ANZCCART, New Zealand, 1998 / Groves, Julian McAllister, Hearts and Minds, 230pp. Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1997 / Lesley J. Rogers and Gisela Kaplan. Not Only Roars and Rituals: Communication in Animals, x + 230pp Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1998 / Clark, Stephen R. L., Animals and their Moral Standing, viii + 194pp., Routledge, London and New York, 1997.

Animal Issues - Complete Issue 3(1) 1999, Denise Russell

Animal Issues

Complete issue.

India's Sacred Cow: Her Plight And Future, Michael W. Fox

Animal Issues

India's sacred cow is embedded in an economic, religious religious and political morass. Her plight is a tragic consequence of many forces, from overpopulation to to modernization, the outcome of which depends upon upon the path that India chooses to take as it becomes a player in the global marketplace. The spirituality of compassion is a boundless ethic that is the cornerstone of a truly equalitarian society that gives all of its members, human and nonhuman, equal and fair consideration. This is the challenge and the solution for all countries whose economic wealth is in part determined by the humane …

Garden, Simone Poirier-Bures

Animal Issues

My husband stared at the hoof tracks in the soft earth and shook his head with disgust. ‘It's bad enough that they bother the fruit trees; now they're after the garden.’ I stared at the tell-tale indentations between the sprouting potatoes and tasselling chives, and imagined them: their sleek necks, their soft brown eyes. We seldom saw them in daylight but their ghost shapes haunted our yard at night. They'd been stripping our small orchard for years, but they'd always left the garden alone. Until last winter, that is. We'd left the parsnips and carrots in the earth to sweeten, …

The Death Penalty Or Lifelong Encagement: Moral Dilemmas About Animals-Without-Further-Destination, Will Kort

Animal Issues

In the first part of this article we consider the emotional burden that comes with killing a laboratory animal. We go on to raise questions about the value of the animal and its future perspectives. In the central part of this article we describe the different possibilities for the surviving laboratory animal once the experiment is completed. One of the moral dilemmas we treat in depth is the choice between the ‘death penalty’ and ‘lifelong encagement’. We conclude by offering some practical recommendations. Knowledge that an animal may survive an experiment has to be taken into consideration by any Animal …