Digital Commons Network^™

Editorial: Back To Basics In Journalism Education Amid The Techno Hype, Eric Loo

Asia Pacific Media Educator

Dominating the discourse among journalism educators in the early ‘90s was how the internet would ‘revolutionise’ journalism practices, how newspapers would see its end days with readers turning to online news sites, and thus, the need to revamp traditional journalism curriculum and focus on ‘new media technologies’. Today, however, the smell and feel of newsprint is as pervasive as it was in 1991 during the days of the Netscape beta and HTML markups. Which reminds me of a remark by John C. Merrill, professor emeritus at the Missouri School of Journalism, at the AEJMC panel discussion I attended in Boston …

Commentary: Whetting A Journalist’S Appetite For Investigative Reporting, Yvonne Chua

Asia Pacific Media Educator

Interest in investigative journalism has spiked in Asia and elsewhere, especially in new democracies, and along with it the demand for training in this field. The challenge for trainers in investigative reporting is to help journalists nimbly navigate what is often uncharted territory that demands dogged pursuit and unraveling of the truth. How to do it? This article shares with journalism trainers a few useful tips on getting journalists hooked on muckraking.

The Development Reporting Outline, Warief Djajanto Basorie

Asia Pacific Media Educator

Reporters are commonly criticized for their incomplete reporting. One way to produce a comprehensive report is to approach an assignment with a methodical plan. The reporting outline is such a plan whereby for journalists to think through six components: the theme, the topic, reference material, sources, angles, and questions. The Jakarta-based Dr. Soetomo Press Institute (Lembaga Pers Dr. Soetomo, LPDS) has conducted numerous journalism workshops throughout Indonesia. A common observation from these workshops is that often news stories in the local press are not comprehensive. A tell-tale sign of inadequate reporting effort is the questions readers ask about the substance …

Teaching Converged Media Through News Coverage Of The 2008 Us Presidential Election And Inauguration, Yanick Rice Lamb, Ingrid Sturgis, Charles B. Fancher

Asia Pacific Media Educator

This commentary provides insights into how the journalism faculty at Howard University in Washington, DC tested the efficacy of its approach to teaching converged media techniques during the US presidential election on November 4, 2008 and the Inauguration of President Barack Obama on January 20, 2009. Coverage of both events were conducted by students supervised by faculty mentors.

Beyond The Aww Factor: Human Interest Profiles Of Paralympians And The Media Navigation Of Physical Difference And Social Stigma, K. Ellis

Asia Pacific Media Educator

People with disability negotiate a complex identity that involves both physical difference and social stigma. Excluded from other identity‑based areas of inquiry, and encouraged to pass as unimpaired by human rights models (see the ability), media representations purporting to offer empowerment may actually perpetuate the biomedical model of disability as it discursively situates disability as deficit. Drawing on work undertaken by Schell and Duncan (1999) this article critically examines current affairs programming (60 Minutes and Australian Story) leading up to the 2008 Paralympics Games to highlight the role the media plays in reflecting and reinforcing social disablement. I will likewise …

The Carey “King Hit”: Journalists And The Coverage Of Domestic Violence, L. Waller, K. M. Oakham

Asia Pacific Media Educator

In recent years Australia’s football codes have been rocked by allegations that star players, both past and present, have acted inappropriately off-field. In some instances these allegations have involved violence towards partners. This paper explores one such case, involving former AFL great Wayne Carey. In so doing, it explores the so-called ‘cult of celebrity’ and the impact this has both on the players and the media who cover such stories. People caught up in traumatic situations labelled as domestic violence have been vulnerable to media misunderstanding and misinterpretation. Coverage of these events and issues surrounding such violence has undergone change …

Writing About Disability: Victoria’S Bar None Campaign, N. Richardson

Asia Pacific Media Educator

The media’s role in covering disability issues is often explored from a perspective of those outside journalism, yet it is a fundamental point that any change in the practices of reporting disability must come from the media itself. This paper explores a Victorian government campaign to recognise people for increasing access for disabled Victorians. The pioneering element of the campaign was that it was based on a partnership with Leader Community Newspapers, one of the largest newspaper networks in Australia, and was accompanied by a commitment from Leader to analyse how journalists used language around the reporting in their newspapers …

Family Violence Reporting: Supporting The Vulnerable Or Re‑Enforcing Their Vulnerability?, V. Lee Thomas, R. Green

Asia Pacific Media Educator

Reporting of family violence in the media is often done in ways that either sensationalise or, alternatively, minimise and trivialise the issue. This article reports on the collection and analysis of reports concerning family violence from five Australian newspapers over a 15‑week period. The research found that reporting varied significantly depending on the ethnicity, gender, age, status and/or religious affiliation of those involved. The analysis uses codes of ethics for reporting as a framework to discuss current examples of reporting about family violence cases and issues in Victoria, Australia. The research identifies opportunities for increasing community understanding of family violence …

Managing The Margins: How Journalism Reports The Vulnerable, I. Richards

Asia Pacific Media Educator

All citizens have the potential to be caught up in a situation which will render them vulnerable to the media; some of the most serious implications are for those who lie at society’s margins. Such individuals are especially vulnerable to journalistic exploitation or misrepresentation, with the attendant risks of public embarrassment, humiliation or psychological trauma. When dealing with society’s most vulnerable, journalists are walking a tightrope between reporting as comprehensively and accurately as possible and treating their news subjects with respect and dignity. The paper argues that professional codes do not provide sufficient guidance through the ethical complexities inherent in …

Guest Editors' Introduction, S. Tanner, K. Green

Asia Pacific Media Educator

If one of the roles of the news media is to reflect society to itself, what do we see in the mass media mirror? Many of us see something that looks at least a little like the world we live in – a world in which our activities, our needs and wants, perhaps even our thoughts, are represented in the news media. Others, however, see a world that’s alien and unrepresentative of them. When they are represented in the news media, they are depicted as the “other” – as different from “mainstream” society. It is not difficult to be depicted …

Disability, Media, And The Politics Of Vulnerability, G. Goggin

Asia Pacific Media Educator

Vulnerability is a topic of considerable and long‑standing importance for understanding media and its place in contemporary culture, social arrangements, and everyday life. Disability and those living with disability are often called to mind in discussions of media and vulnerability. In this paper, I sketch a critique of such dominant concepts of vulnerability and media. Firstly I discuss the problems with vulnerability, as currently conceived, as a way of understanding contemporary media and disability. Secondly, I give an overview of the state of the art of research on media and disability, and what priority research is needed. Thirdly, I consider …

Health Communication Theories: Implications For Hiv Reporting In Asia And The Pacific, T. Cullen

Asia Pacific Media Educator

This paper focuses on the expanding HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus) epidemic in parts of Asia and the Pacific region and recommends the adoption of insights from particular health communication theories. The author argues that these paradigms can assist in broadening the current scope and content of HIV reporting. One theory in particular – Social Change Communication (SCC) - challenges the media to extend the framing of HIV from primarily a health story to one that is linked to more macro socio-economic, cultural and political factors. Asian and Pacific countries that have an emerging or expanding HIV epidemic need to realise …

Trans-Chinese Imagination: Film And Cross-Strait Perception As A Historical Case Study For Contextual Journalism Education, S. C. Berggreen, R. M. Peaslee

Asia Pacific Media Educator

It is a truism that film, like many other visual media, can stimulate and assist the social imagination of their viewing audiences. At the same time, it can also be an implement in the toolbox of the cultural journalist. Through textual analysis of Ermo (1994, People’s Republic of China) and Eat, Drink, Man, Woman (1994, Taiwan, Republic of China), we explore how these two films project the concepts of modernity, gender relation and, most of all, the virtues and inflictions of being Chinese. A joint Trans-Chinese imagination emerges through these two separate films, despite the reported political and ideological differences …

Public Journalism: An Agenda For Future Research, T. Haas

Asia Pacific Media Educator

This article summarizes the empirical research literature on public journalism as a means to articulate a broad agenda for future research. After a brief overview of the theory and practice of public journalism, it proceeds to outline potentially fruitful areas of inquiry relating to three of the most significant research foci: (1) journalists’ attitudes toward public journalism; (2) differences between public journalism-inspired and conventional, journalistic newswork practices; and (3) public journalism’s wider impact. Following this discussion, pedagogical implications of some of the issues raised are examined. The article concludes by considering the most important questions that future research on public …

Turning The Inverted Pyramid Upside Down: How Australian Print Media Is Learning To Love The Narrative, J. Johnston

Asia Pacific Media Educator

Print journalism has long embraced the inverted pyramid, that writing style which emerged in the latter part of the 19th century. While still a popular option, other styles are moving in to share the space at the front of the daily newspaper. This paper will present the findings of a pilot study of narrative writing in two Australian daily papers. Over a period of one month during April-May 2007, the style of news in the front pages of The Australian and The Sydney Morning Herald was analysed to determine how much were written in the inverted pyramid and how much …

Awakening A Social Conscience: The Study Of Novels In Journalism Education, J. Whitt

Asia Pacific Media Educator

This study deals with the nonfiction novel in journalism ethics, literary journalism, media studies, newsgathering, and reporting and writing classes. We are often confronted with the mistaken notion that the novel is for entertainment while news stories are to provide information and to encourage effective civic engagement. For some journalism educators and for many in the reading public, reading fiction is something one does on airplanes; reading nonfiction, on the other hand, impacts political and social discourse. The borderland between literary and journalistic study is a problematic one, with some professors in English contending that journalism is hack writing and …

Managing News In A Managed Media: Mediating The Message In Malaysiakini.Com, A. Pang

Asia Pacific Media Educator

Widely regarded as an anomaly in the neo-authoritarian system in Malaysia, Malaysiakini.com is proving that managing an independent media in a government-managed media landscape is more than a Sisyphean struggle. Employing participant observation and interviews, supplemented by artifacts and media accounts, this study seeks to understand the media management of Malaysiakini.com through news management, using Shoemaker and Reese’s (1996) hierarchy of influence model, which posits a framework of internal and external forces that affect news management. The study found determined attempts to minimize ideological influences through media socialization by accentuating on the direct influences, such as the journalists’ role in …

Blogging As Pedagogic Practice: Artefact And Ecology, Marcus O'Donnell

Asia Pacific Media Educator

Much of the published discussion and research on blogs and teaching and learning in higher education focuses on evaluation of blogging as a communicative technique. This type of discussion largely assumes that successful integration of blogging into course delivery should be judged against a pre-existing and unchallenged pedagogical model. This paper argues that to leverage its full educational potential blogging must be understood not just as an isolated phenomena, but as part of a broad palette of cybercultural practices which provide us with new ways of doing and thinking. The paper looks at the ways broader theoretical models associated with …

Coverage Of The Central Asian Political, Press, And Speech Rights Issues By Independent News Websites, E. Freedman

Asia Pacific Media Educator

Since independence in 1991, the Central Asian republics to varying degrees have given lip service to democratization and the recognition of free press and political rights. However, the reality has been dramatically different under all five authoritarian regimes. That reality includes limits or bans on opposition parties, as well as elections that are neither fair nor free. Most mass media entities remain state-owned or tightly controlled, and there is pervasive censorship, self-censorship, harassment, and intimidation of individual journalists and their media organizations. One result is inadequate, shallow reporting about political, press, and speech rights and controversies. Western-based Web news sites …

Sourcing The News: Teaching Journalism Students Different Approaches To Sourcing Practices, J. Ewart, J. Cokely, P. Coats

Asia Pacific Media Educator

The experiences of a group of Australian university journalism students from diverse backgrounds are explored as they become involved in producing five editions of a new newspaper for the isolated community of Blackall in the Queensland Outback, 1500km north-west of Sydney. During this learning experience, non-traditional journalistic sourcing methods were trialed. This paper documents the exercise, compares the alternative methods with existing practices identified in the literature, and examines the effects and consequences of the exercise.

From Campus To Newsroom In The South Pacific: Credible Media Career Paths Versus 'Academic Anaemia', D. Robie, S. Singh

Asia Pacific Media Educator

The University of the South Pacific’s Regional Journalism Programme, which caters for 12 member countries1 from the Cook Islands in the east to the Solomon Islands in the west, was founded in 1994 with French Government aid. It began producing double major graduate journalists for the South Pacific from 1996. Two-thirds of the graduates live and work in Fiji. While some news media organisations in Fiji have generally recruited graduates, others have preferred to hire untrained school leavers. Parallel with draft legislation designed to turn the self-regulating Fiji Media Council into a statutory body, there have been public calls for …

Use Of Internet In Political Participation In South Korea, S. Bhuiyan

Asia Pacific Media Educator

This article examines the role of the Internet in political participation in South Korea. It reveals that the Internet brought majority of the voters into the political process and produced a more fact-based election process in South Korea. It also reveals that Internet accessibility has become a stronger factor to explain increased voter participation. This article suggests that the rapid diffusion of Internet along with broadband connections have contributed to the increased use of Internet among young voters.

The Lucky Few: Female Graduands Of Communication Studies In The Indonesian Media Industry, P. Utari, P. Nilan

Asia Pacific Media Educator

For some years, women have been entering Indonesian communications degrees in much larger numbers than men, but only a minority of media workers at present are women. This paper reports on research into the limiting factors, which affect the progress of female communications graduates into professional media work. A case study was used to investigate the gap between the number of women enrolling in communication studies at Universitas Sebelas Maret in Solo, Central Java, and those working in television, radio, newspapers, tabloids and journals, public relations and advertising across Indonesia. This paper concludes by describing some of the factors, which …

Rethinking The Journalism Curriculum In Png, D. Rooney

Asia Pacific Media Educator

This paper reports on the changes Divine Word University in Madang, Papua New Guinea, is making to its journalism curriculum. It has taught journalism since 1979 mainly with an emphasis on journalism craft skills. This model has been replaced by an ideological model that identifies social justice and the need to provide a voice for the voiceless, while holding the powerful to account, as the central issues for journalists. This new mission is aspirational and much work still has to be done on the curriculum. This paper examines the new model and situates it in a number of contexts: the …

Journalism Ethics: Mainstream Versus Tabloid Journalists, R. Y. G. Er, H. Xiaoming

Asia Pacific Media Educator

Through a survey of 356 journalists working for various newspapers under the Singapore Press Holdings, this study shows that despite the influence of newsroom culture, journalists working for the mainstream and tabloid newspapers may not differ in terms of their professional values and ethical standards. It is the content orientation of their newspaper or their perception of it that leads them to act differently in covering certain kinds of news. In other words, the institutional influence does have an impact on the ethical decision-making process among journalists in their daily operations even though it may not determine the direction of …

Book Review: Media Fortunes, Changing Times: Asean States In Transition, S. Ramanathan

Asia Pacific Media Educator

Heng, Russell (ed) (2002)
Media Fortunes, Changing Times: ASEAN States in Transition,
Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore. ISBN. 252 pp.

Reviewed by Sankaran Ramanathan

Are ASEAN states in transition? If so, how many of the 10 states are? Are there changing times that the presumed transition brings, and if there are, have media fortunes been affected? If so, how have they been affected? If we were to gauge on the basis of political uncertainty, Indonesia, Laos and Cambodia qualify as being states under transition. If we were to broaden the definition to include countries whose economies are under transition …

Sustainable News: A Profile Of Journalists Who Tell The Story Of Asia's Environment, B. Massey, S. Ramanathan

Asia Pacific Media Educator

This article reports on a preliminary profile of Asian environmental journalists. Demographic, news-topic priority and Internet-use variables were tested on a convenience sample of print journalists from 18 countries. On average, they reported on the environment at least weekly, but there was generally little correspondence between the subjects of their reporting and their perceptions of their countries’ most serious environmental problems. Yet they showed a promising potential for strengthening their coverage by using the Internet as a research and networking tool.

Tertiary Journalism Education: Its Value In Cadet Selection At Metropolitan Media, B. Alysen

Asia Pacific Media Educator

Tertiary study in journalism has been a feature of the education of Australian journalists for decades. Yet the value of what is loosely termed a ‘journalism degree’ continues to be debated, and many industry representatives remain sceptical of its value. Journalism educators have a number of ways of assessing the level of industry acceptance of journalism education. These include looking at the percentage of students who find employment and the percentage of journalism graduates who fill entry-level positions. This paper addresses the latter category, looking at data on the employment of entry-level journalists at four major institutions over a period …

Journalism Education And Multiculturalism: Enhancing The Curriculum, M. Deuze

Asia Pacific Media Educator

Scholarly and professional debates on issues regarding multiculturalism vis-à-vis journalism can be seen as a particular feature of the 1990s in many (Western) democracies. Several journalism programs have introduced the topic in their curriculum. Many have not. In this paper the concept of multiculturalism is explored in terms of how it is articulated to journalism and education in particular. Three dimensions are identified and investigated: the professional knowledge of journalists regarding cultural and ethnic diversity, their respresentations of diversity and the responsibilities of journalists covering diversity. Based on an inventory of journalism curricula (available online) in the United States, Australia …

Teenagers And The Fragmenting Media Environment In Asia: An Australian Pilot Study, J. Sternberg, C. George, J. Green

Asia Pacific Media Educator

This paper presents preliminary results from a survey of 15- to 17-year old Australians, exploring television’s place within a rapidly expanding multimedia environment. Inspired by Livingstone et al’s 1998 pan- European study into young people and media use, the paper finds strong evidence for arguing that Australian youths’ media use is currently in a state of flux. While young people generally have more access to a greater range of media than ever before, discussing youth media use involves mapping complex combinations of diverse media and the influences and outcomes of this use. The paper lays foundations for more comprehensive studies …