How disappointing to read another opinion piece in Australian papers repeating time-old arguments that fail to acknowledge the excellent education in journalism provided by universities around the country, an education many working journalists – and therefore readers – have benefited from.

It is concerning that anyone would argue that there are thousands of journalism graduates in Australia each year. There are not thousands of journalism graduates in Australia, as anyone who has tried to hire one in regional Australia would well know.

At my own university, RMIT, we can barely graduate enough journalism students for the needs of the Victorian news industry.

READ MORE: Back to the future: It’s time to rethink the way we train journalists

Universities in the states also report excellent employment opportunities for recent and soon-to-be graduates.

Australian universities generally offer a more general communications degree that can be used for a range of careers beyond journalism. Very few programmes offer straight journalism degrees and even those that do provide students with a range of courses that give graduates a much greater range of skills than the vocational skills taught in the legacy news organisations of yesteryear.

Thirty years ago, there was some in-house training for journalism cadets. I am also a product of the “straight from high school” cadetship system of this period, and I am acutely aware of its deficits.

On-the-job training at legacy media was well-intentioned and concentrated mostly on correct grammar rather than the skills required for modern reporting.

Critical thinking, research skills
Today’s university graduates who want to become are likely to have completed courses that allow them to manipulate data spreadsheets, create visualisations, fact check and verify information, capture photographs and audio, take photographs, and put together audio and visual packages. They also develop critical thinking and research skills, and learn about politics and the economy.

New technology has provided journalism students with opportunities far beyond what is offered by the legacy media. Media fragmentation and the speed of disseminating information and opinion present opportunities for graduates with a good understanding of how to leverage new technologies and platforms such as social media, digital and interactive TV, and how to produce rich mobile content.

I certainly agree with it would be fantastic to have entry-level journalism students paid while learning. For me, the legacy media is no longer in a position to provide sufficient in-house education to young trainees because they’ve been cut to the bone with no space for training and certainly cannot provide the depth of training that a university offers.

However, I’m sure all educators would welcome legacy news offerings offering paid journalism internships which are already an important part of a journalism university programme.

While some are pessimistic about the industry, I have no hesitation in encouraging anyone interested in a career in journalism to enrol in a university programme. Journalism is not only a fun-filled and exciting course of study, it is one from which, when our work is done well, every Australian benefits.

In short, our work is critical to and underpins civil society.

Dr Alexandra Wake is president of the Journalism Education and Research Association of Australia (JERAA).

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

By Kerrie Davies and Willa McDonald in Sydney

In 1886, a year before American journalist Nellie Bly feigned insanity to enter an asylum in New York and became a household name, Catherine Hay Thomson arrived at the entrance of Kew Asylum in Melbourne on “a hot grey morning with a lowering sky”.

Hay Thomson’s two-part article, The Female Side of Kew Asylum for The Argus newspaper revealed the conditions women endured in Melbourne’s public institutions.

Her articles were controversial, engaging, empathetic, and most likely the first known by an Australian female undercover journalist.

READ MORE: 10 days in a madhouse, by Nellie Bly

A ‘female vagabond’
Hay Thomson was accused of being a spy by Kew Asylum’s supervising doctor. The Bulletin called her “the female vagabond”, a reference to Melbourne’s famed undercover reporter of a decade earlier, Julian Thomas.

But she was not after notoriety.

Unlike Bly and her ambitious contemporaries who turned to “stunt journalism” to escape the boredom of the women’s pages – one of the few avenues open to women newspaper writers – Hay Thomson was initially a teacher and ran schools with her mother in Melbourne and Ballarat.

In 1876, she became one of the first female students to sit for the matriculation exam at Melbourne University, though women weren’t allowed to study at the university until 1880.

Going undercover
Hay Thomson’s series for The Argus began in March 1886 with a piece entitled The Inner Life of the Melbourne Hospital. She secured work as an assistant nurse at Melbourne Hospital (now The Royal Melbourne Hospital) which was under scrutiny for high running costs and an abnormally high patient death rate.

Her articles increased the pressure. She observed that the assistant nurses were untrained, worked largely as cleaners for poor pay in unsanitary conditions, slept in overcrowded dormitories and survived on the same food as the patients, which she described in stomach-turning detail.

The hospital linen was dirty, she reported, dinner tins and jugs were washed in the patients’ bathroom where poultices were also made, doctors did not wash their hands between patients.

Writing about a young woman caring for her dying friend, a 21-year-old impoverished single mother, Hay Thomson observed them “clinging together through all fortunes” and added that “no man can say that friendship between women is an impossibility”.

The Argus editorial called for the setting up of a “ladies’ committee” to oversee the cooking and cleaning. Formal nursing training was introduced in Victoria three years later.

Kew Asylum
Hay Thomson’s next series, about women’s treatment in the Kew Asylum, was published in March and April 1886.

Her articles predate Ten Days in a Madhouse written by Nellie Bly (born Elizabeth Cochran) for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World.

While working in the asylum for a fortnight, Hay Thomson witnessed overcrowding, understaffing, a lack of training, and a need for woman physicians. Most of all, the reporter saw that many in the asylum suffered from institutionalisation rather than illness.

She described “the girl with the lovely hair” who endured chronic ear pain and was believed to be delusional. The writer countered “her pain is most probably real”.

Observing another patient, Hay Thomson wrote:

She requires to be guarded – saved from herself; but at the same time, she requires treatment … I have no hesitation in saying that the kind of treatment she needs is unattainable in Kew Asylum.

The day before the first asylum article was published, Hay Thomson gave evidence to the final sitting of Victoria’s Royal Commission on Asylums for the Insane and Inebriate, pre-empting what was to come in The Argus. Among the Commission’s final recommendations was that a new governing board should supervise appointments and training and appoint “lady physicians” for the female wards.

Suffer the little children
In May 1886, An Infant Asylum written “by a Visitor” was published. The institution was a place where mothers – unwed and impoverished – could reside until their babies were weaned and later adopted out.

Hay Thomson reserved her harshest criticism for the absent fathers:

These women … have to bear the burden unaided, all the weight of shame, remorse, and toil, [while] the other partner in the sin goes scot free.

For another article, Among the Blind: Victorian Asylum and School, she worked as an assistant needlewoman and called for talented music students at the school to be allowed to sit exams.

In A Penitent’s Life in the Magdalen Asylum, Hay Thomson supported nuns’ efforts to help women at the Abbotsford Convent, most of whom were not residents because they were “fallen”, she explained, but for reasons including alcoholism, old age and destitution.

Suffrage and leadership
Hay Thomson helped found the Austral Salon of Women, Literature and the Arts in January 1890 and the National Council of Women of Victoria. Both organisations are still celebrating and campaigning for women.

Throughout, she continued writing, becoming Table Talk magazine’s music and social critic.

In 1899 she became editor of The Sun: An Australian Journal for the Home and Society, which she bought with Evelyn Gough. Hay Thomson also gave a series of lectures titled Women in Politics.

A Melbourne hotel maintains that Hay Thomson’s private residence was secretly on the fourth floor of Collins Street’s Rialto building around this time.

Home and back
After selling The Sun, Hay Thomson returned to her birth city, Glasgow, Scotland, and to a precarious freelance career for English magazines such as Cassell’s.

Despite her own declining fortunes, she brought attention to writer and friend Grace Jennings Carmichael’s three young sons, who had been stranded in a Northampton poorhouse for six years following their mother’s death from pneumonia.

After Hay Thomson’s article in The Argus, the Victorian government granted them free passage home.

Hay Thomson eschewed the conformity of marriage but tied the knot back in Melbourne in 1918, aged 72. The wedding at the Women Writer’s Club to Thomas Floyd Legge, culminated “a romance of 40 years ago”. Mrs Legge, as she became, died in Cheltenham in 1928, only nine years later.

Dr Kerrie Davies is a lecturer in the School of the Arts & Media, UNSW, and Dr Willa McDonald is a senior lecturer at Macquarie University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz