Jock Cheetham, senior lecturer in news and media in the Charles Sturt School of Information and Communication Studies in Bathurst, said recent “news” of the demise of the journalism course was greatly exaggerated.

Cheetham said he was surprised to wake up and read a media report in late July suggesting journalism was not being taught separately at Charles Sturt University.

“That day I spent six hours teaching news and media, also known as ‘journalism’,” he said.

“Actually, on that Tuesday we had ABC veteran Trevor Watson visit us on campus to give a guest talk on journalism, specifically news writing, which was also streamed to online students.

“Before that talk, I spent two hours with a class analysing media coverage of The Voice to Parliament Referendum campaigns. After Trevor’s talk, I held a news writing tutorial doing practice exercises on the hard news style of reporting.”

‘Pretty journalistic day’
He said it was a “pretty journalistic” day.

“We’re still teaching journalism, with practical opportunities to work in newsrooms, such as National Radio News,” he said.

Cheetham emphasised that quality journalism had never been more important, and Charles Sturt had an enviable reputation for producing some of the world’s best, most-renowned journalists.

As the original ABC article noted, over the past five decades, the university has nurtured some of the nation’s most high-profile communicators, including Andrew Denton, Melissa Doyle, Samantha Armytage, Hamish Macdonald, Chris Bath, and current ABC News Europe correspondent Nick Dole.

“Charles Sturt University will continue to educate and train journalists for the evolving media landscape,” Cheetham said.

“At the University campus in Bathurst we continue to have cutting-edge facilities, such as a TV studio, a community broadcasting radio station, and editing suites, for our students to gain skills and insights into working in their chosen fields.

“We’re also investing substantial funds in the communications hub that will provide new facilities for our future students.”

For example, graduates from 2021 include 7News (Central West) journalist Reuben Spargo who won the 2021 JERAA Ossie Award for ‘national student journalist of the year’.

“Charles Sturt threw practical skills at me and helped grow my confidence as a communicator,” Spargo said.

“The connections I made and the experiences I shared allowed me to hit the ground running within the industry.”

Keeping pace
Cheetham said to keep pace with the ever-changing media industry and digital advancements, Charles Sturt had launched a new communication course with its first intake last year, 2022.

“The new Bachelor of Communication offers specialisations in strategic communication, news and media — journalism, which I teach — and design and content creation,” he said.

“Teaching the critical role of journalism is still very much a priority at Charles Sturt. The changes represent a transition from one version of the journalism degree, which we have offered for more than 50 years, into a new degree program.

“The philosophy behind the new course remains the same — we’re aiming to produce people who are good storytellers. We have retained a lot of the strongest elements of the old course bringing them into the new course.”

Having industry and alumni co-design the course with academic staff offers students a unique combination of academic, discipline-specific specialisations with a sound understanding of the industry through the networking and industry connections embedded within the course.

The format of the new degree combines first-hand industry knowledge and advice, and to have industry professionals sharing knowledge, expertise and daily experiences will be a real game changer for the students.

Republished from CSU News with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Paul and Selwyn will deep dive into the battle to control a narrative, waged by all sides in a polarised combative world, and how modern mainstream media institutions, like Radio New Zealand, fall vulnerable in the absence of robust all-sides-considered analysis and debate.

In this episode, Paul and Selwyn will analyse how fourth Estate bias, propaganda, and conflict-force fact-vacuums are the challenge of our times in this disinformation age.

Upon this context, Paul and Selwyn will consider:

* Why Is the Radio New Zealand sub-editor pro-RU-content debacle symptomatic of a fact-vacuum environment?

* Why is all media vulnerable to disinformation in the absence of robust NATO-Ukraine-Russia analysis?

* What are the unspoken of ‘big picture’ shifts in Russian Federation / Global South relations?

LINKS and REFERENCES:

• https://KiwiPolitico.com
• https://www.dekoder.org/de/person/ekaterina-schulmann-0
• https://www.rnz.co.nz/media/180
• https://www.rnz.co.nz/programmes/news-extras/story/2018893905/rnz-editorial-audit
• https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/top/491788/nz-entering-ukraine-conflict-at-whim-of-govt-former-labour-general-secretary
• https://meduza.io/en/feature/2023/02/25/russia-ends-nowhere-they-say
• https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/why-russian-elites-think-putins-war-is-doomed-to-fail

INTERACTION WHILE LIVE:

Paul and Selwyn encourage their live audience to interact while they are live with questions and comments.

To interact during the live recording of this podcast, go to Youtube.com/c/EveningReport/

Remember to subscribe to the channel.

For the on-demand audience, you can also keep the conversation going on this debate by clicking on one of the social media channels below:

• Youtube.com/c/EveningReport/
• Facebook.com/selwyn.manning
• Twitter.com/Selwyn_Manning

RECOGNITION: The MIL Network’s podcast A View from Afar was Nominated as a Top Defence Security Podcast by Threat.Technology – a London-based cyber security news publication. Threat.Technology placed A View from Afar at 9th in its 20 Best Defence Security Podcasts of 2021 category.

You can follow A View from Afar via our affiliate syndicators.

Dr Mohamed El-Guindy … time for universities to step up or face an Orwellian future. Image: David Robie/PMC

 By DAVID ROBIE in Bangkok

A LEADING cyber security expert has called on universities to play a more active role in implementing ethics and legal frameworks for communications smart technology to save society from an Orwellian future.

Dr Mohamed El-Guindy, an Egyptian consultant to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC-ROMENA), says communication research programmes should promote “ethically aligned” design.

In an era of “accelerated addictiveness” to smartphone and other digital technologies, he told media researchers, policy advisers and journalists at the recent 27th Asian Media Information and Communication (AMIC) conference in Bangkok, Thailand, that it was vital for democracy that universities stepped up.

He also said families and parents needed to be more critically active by balancing screen time and promoting “real social interaction”.

Addressing the “persuasive technologies” industry, Dr El-Guindy spoke about being “hooked”, the “scrolling dopamine loop” and the “digital skinner box” models and how they had made smartphones fill psychological needs.

“Our social fabric is being torn apart,” he said. “As we expect more from technology, we expect less from each other as people.

Climate change guide
Among four new international books about communication research and technology, prolific Filipino author and communications expert Dr Maslog launched his 36th title, Science Writing and Climate Change.

Developed as a guide for journalists in the Asia-Pacific region, it has been co-authored with New Zealand’s Pacific Media Centre director Professor David Robie and regional editor Joel Adriano of SciDev.Net, a leading online publication with a focus of science and development.

Among several UNESCO delegates and speakers at the conference, Dorothy Gordon, of the governing board of the UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies in Education, called on participants to lobby through their national commissions and global agencies if they wanted action.

“Asia has the potential to be in control, it can make changes for tech for peace,” she said. “UNESCO is made up of member states. If you want something to happen, you need to lobby your own country first to take up the issue.”

Malaysia’s Dr Azman Azwan Azmawati, an associate professor at the Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) in Penang and president of the Asian Congress for Media and Communication (ACMC), called for more critical research on patriarchal systems.

“It is crucial for more study of patriarchal systems because of their negative impact on women and stereotyping of women,” she said. “The patriarchal system hinders women from reaching their potential.”

Power imbalance
Much more research was needed to focus on the imbalance of power – ‘deconstructing the power of the powerful over the powerless.

“Cultural norms and mindsets must be re-examined, critiqued, reevaluated and rethought.”

Professor Mark Pearson of Australia’s Griffith University spoke of human rights advocacy journalism in a global justice context.

“Global justice can be a legitimate ethical objective of advocacy journalism, requiring factuality as a platform,” he said.

“It is achievable in some cases through a wise and intentional position of ‘advocacy journalism’ which sits comfortably with the professional values of the livelihood of journalists.”

He cited several examples of advocacy journalism in Australia and New Zealand, including Greenpeace investigative journalist Phil Vine.

Dr Pearson, author of The Journalist’s Guide to Media Law, also spoke about “mindful journalism”, a form of journalism with “wisdom and compassion” drawing from elements of secular Buddhist approaches to meditation and ethics.

He dedicated a separate paper on the topic to the memory of Dr Shelton Gunaratne, who died in March this year after being awarded the 2016 AMIC Asia Communication Award for his “ground-breaking scholarship and intellectual contribution to Asian media and communication research”.

High tech ‘slavery’
Professor Jack Linchuan Qiu, author of Goodbye iSlave and director of the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s C-Centre for Chinese Media and Comparative Communication Research, gave an inspired address on the impact of modern day “slavery” in the high tech industries.

Taiwan’s Professor Georgette Wang of the National Chengchi University engaged with the debate about Asian research methodologies, saying that perhaps the right questions were not being asked.

She said there was an absence of “East-West dialogue” over research methodologies and there needed to be more engagement. Blaming globalisation, she said that while the “periphery” had gained greater presence in the international arena, it had also “brought the profile of theories and questions originating in the West to greater prominence”.

Instead of rejecting Western research models in an Asian context, more effort was needed to “develop a new paradigm” drawing on both East-West traditions.

• Full story and images on Asia Pacific Report

David Robie’s Radio 95bFM Southern Cross commentary about the conference.