Journalism students' motivations and expectations of their work in comparative perspective

Based on a survey of 4,393 journalism students in Australia, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States, this study provides much-needed comparative evidence about students’ motivations for becoming journalists, their future job plans, and expectations. Findings show not only an almost universal decline in students’ desire to work in journalism by the end of their program but also important national differences in terms of the journalistic fields in which they want to work, as well as their job expectations. The results reinforce the need to take into account national contexts when examining journalism education across the globe.

On the relevance of travel journalism : An introduction

Not many people will be instantly familiar with British woman Dale Sheppard-Floyd, but – at least symbolically – she represents a significant milestone in the development of travel and tourism. In fact, the milestone was so significant that the United Nations World Tourism Organization booked Madrid’s venerable Museo del Prado to announce to the world’s media her visit to Spain on 13 December 2012. For Ms Sheppard-Floyd’s arrival for a three-day trip meant that more than one billion times in that year, someone had crossed a border as a tourist. An astounding number, considering that, in 1950, there had been only 25 million tourist arrivals worldwide, and even only two decades previously – in 1990 – the number had been less than half at 435 million arrivals (World Tourism Organization, 2012a, 2012b). While people have traveled for pleasure for millennia (Towner, 1995), tourism really came into its own with the expansion of the middle classes in the 19th and 20th century, and today it is considered the world’s largest business sector, with unprecedented numbers of people venturing outside of their immediate environments to explore the world around them. In 2012, travel and tourism’s total contribution to the world economy amounted to a staggering $6.6 trillion, or 9 per cent of GDP (World Travel & Tourism Council, 2013). More than 260 million jobs were generated by it worldwide, which equates to one in every 11 jobs across the globe. While there were some hiccups during the Global Financial Crisis, growth in 2012 was stronger than in other industries, such as manufacturing, financial services and retail (World Travel & Tourism Council, 2013)...

Foreign news coverage in five African newspapers

One of the principal arguments that dominated intellectual debate in the 19805 concerned the imbalance in the quantity and quality of world news, in particular news from developing countries. African delegates at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), supported by other developing countries, argued that most of the news disseminated by the major Western news agencies was unfavourable to developing countries in qualitative and quantitative terms. Not only did Western news media pay little attention to news of developing countries, it was also argued that the few items that made the news tended to focus on negative events such as crises, wars, coups, riots, street demonstrations, diseases, poverty, pestilence, etc. More than 20 years after the intellectual debate received attention in academic journals, this study set out to examine systematically how African newspapers report the world. The researchers investigate the relative degree of balance and imbalance in the coverage of world news by Nigerian and Ghanaian newspapers. The study also examines Nigerian and Ghanaian journalists’ perceptions of world news coverage by local and foreign newspapers.

Global journalism in the digital age

Mass media have transitioned in the past five years from being one-way communication mediums, from journalists to audiences, into an era of networked digital media in which individuals can easily publish text, photos and video to a world-wide audience.The power of the press is severely threatened and its business model is broken...

WIL-power: Developing journalism students' intercultural communications and international reporting skills on field trips to Vietnam

This article examines journalism students' learning experience that is intercultural, immersive and intensive. Accounts of 'intercultural' experience date back to Herodotus of Halicarnassus; 'immersion' is integral to contemporary practice in language learning; and 'intensive' delivery has been refined to an art by postgraduate business education. Together they can be grouped under the broader pedagogical concept of work-integrated learning (WIL). This article examines two WIL projects that involved field trips by journalism students to Vietnam in 2012 and 2014, and their implications for future WIL initiatives.

UQ in Vietnam: Teaching journalism students foreign correspondence

The University of Queensland has developed Work Integrated Learning (WIL) courses for groups of 10 students at a time to travel to Vietnam to engage in intercultural learning and working as foreign correspondents for a dedicated UQ multimedia website. Their radio, television, print and photojournalism reports have also been made available to media around the world under Creative Commons arrangements. This article reports on the students' experience in both WIL courses where they were exposed to intensive, immerse and experiential teaching and coaching by a lecturer (the researcher who is a former foreign correspondent for the ABC) and two tutors with expertise in editorial and technical production.

Global journalism investigations in the digital age: Connections and collaborations

Investigative journalists who join what theorist Manuel Castells describes as the ‘network society’ can locate potential news sources using various social media platforms and interview them using Web-based communication technologies. The potential for journalistic investigations involving multi-directional conversations with news sources across the globe is beginning to be explored. Potential news sources who are part of the network society have unprecedented access to specialist investigative reporters irrespective of their location and can speak to them more cost effectively than in the past. This paper explores how new journalism technologies are allowing journalists to call powerful individuals and institutions to account, irrespective of national borders; and how previously silenced individuals are being given a voice. To read an example of international investigative journalism facilitated by a combination of social media, Web-based communications, reporter collaboration and news outlet collaborations see http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/churchs-wall-of-silence-on-sexual-abuse/story-e6frg6z6-1226639077238.

Japonica rice: Intellectual property, scientific publishing and data-sharing

This article examines a series of controversies within the life sciences over data sharing. Part 1 focuses upon the agricultural biotechnology firm Syngenta publishing data on the rice genome in the journal Science, and considers proposals to reform scientific publishing and funding to encourage data sharing. Part 2 examines the relationship between intellectual property rights and scientific publishing, in particular copyright protection of databases, and evaluates the declaration of the Human Genome Organisation that genomic databases should be global public goods. Part 3 looks at varying opinions on the information function of patent law, and then considers the proposals of Patrinos and Drell to provide incentives for private corporations to release data into the public domain.

Working the story : News curation in social media as a second save of citizen journalism

For the first decade of its existence, the concept of citizen journalism has described an approach which was seen as a broadening of the participant base in journalistic processes, but still involved only a comparatively small subset of overall society – for the most part, citizen journalists were news enthusiasts and “political junkies” (Coleman, 2006) who, as some exasperated professional journalists put it, “wouldn’t get a job at a real newspaper” (The Australian, 2007), but nonetheless followed many of the same journalistic principles. The investment – if not of money, then at least of time and effort – involved in setting up a blog or participating in a citizen journalism Website remained substantial enough to prevent the majority of Internet users from engaging in citizen journalist activities to any significant extent; what emerged in the form of news blogs and citizen journalism sites was a new online elite which for some time challenged the hegemony of the existing journalistic elite, but gradually also merged with it. The mass adoption of next-generation social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, however, has led to the emergence of a new wave of quasi-journalistic user activities which now much more closely resemble the “random acts of journalism” which JD Lasica envisaged in 2003. Social media are not exclusively or even predominantly used for citizen journalism; instead, citizen journalism is now simply a by-product of user communities engaging in exchanges about the topics which interest them, or tracking emerging stories and events as they happen. Such platforms – and especially Twitter with its system of ad hoc hashtags that enable the rapid exchange of information about issues of interest – provide spaces for users to come together to “work the story” through a process of collaborative gatewatching (Bruns, 2005), content curation, and information evaluation which takes place in real time and brings together everyday users, domain experts, journalists, and potentially even the subjects of the story themselves. Compared to the spaces of news blogs and citizen journalism sites, but also of conventional online news Websites, which are controlled by their respective operators and inherently position user engagement as a secondary activity to content publication, these social media spaces are centred around user interaction, providing a third-party space in which everyday as well as institutional users, laypeople as well as experts converge without being able to control the exchange. Drawing on a number of recent examples, this article will argue that this results in a new dynamic of interaction and enables the emergence of a more broadly-based, decentralised, second wave of citizen engagement in journalistic processes.

Submarine record of volcanic island construction and collapse in the Lesser Antilles arc: First scientific drilling of submarine volcanic island landslides by IODP Expedition 340

IODP Expedition 340 successfully drilled a series of sites offshore Montserrat, Martinique and Dominica in the Lesser Antilles from March to April 2012. These are among the few drill sites gathered around volcanic islands, and the first scientific drilling of large and likely tsunamigenic volcanic island-arc landslide deposits. These cores provide evidence and tests of previous hypotheses for the composition and origin of those deposits. Sites U1394, U1399, and U1400 that penetrated landslide deposits recovered exclusively seafloor sediment, comprising mainly turbidites and hemipelagic deposits, and lacked debris avalanche deposits. This supports the concepts that i/ volcanic debris avalanches tend to stop at the slope break, and ii/ widespread and voluminous failures of preexisting low-gradient seafloor sediment can be triggered by initial emplacement of material from the volcano. Offshore Martinique (U1399 and 1400), the landslide deposits comprised blocks of parallel strata that were tilted or microfaulted, sometimes separated by intervals of homogenized sediment (intense shearing), while Site U1394 offshore Montserrat penetrated a flat-lying block of intact strata. The most likely mechanism for generating these large-scale seafloor sediment failures appears to be propagation of a decollement from proximal areas loaded and incised by a volcanic debris avalanche. These results have implications for the magnitude of tsunami generation. Under some conditions, volcanic island landslide deposits composed of mainly seafloor sediment will tend to form smaller magnitude tsunamis than equivalent volumes of subaerial block-rich mass flows rapidly entering water. Expedition 340 also successfully drilled sites to access the undisturbed record of eruption fallout layers intercalated with marine sediment which provide an outstanding high-resolution data set to analyze eruption and landslides cycles, improve understanding of magmatic evolution as well as offshore sedimentation processes.

Voice, deliberation, resistance and persuasion through networked journalism

The pervasive use of the World Wide Web by the general population has created a cultural shift in “our living world”. It has enabled more people to share more information about more events and issues in the world than was possible before its general use. As a consequence, it has transformed traditional news media’s approach to almost every aspect of journalism, with many organisations restructuring their philosophy and practice to include a variety of participatory spaces/forums where people are free to engage in deliberative dialogue about matters of public importance. Moreover, while news media were the traditional gatekeepers of information, today many organisations allow, to different degrees, the general public and other independent journalism entities to participate in the news production process, which may include agenda setting and content production. This paper draws from an international collective case study that showcases various approaches to networked online news journalism. It examines the ways in which different traditional news media models use digital tools and technologies for participatory communication of information about matters of public interest. The research finds differences between the ways in which public service, commercial and independent news media give voice to the public and ultimately their approach to journalism’s role as the Fourth Estate––one of the key institutions of democracy. The work is framed by the notion that journalism in democratic societies has a key role in ensuring citizens are informed and engaged with public affairs. An examination of four media models, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), the Guardian, News Limited and OhmyNews, showcases the various approaches to networked online news journalism and how each provides different avenues for citizen empowerment. The cases are described and analysed in the context of their own social, political and economic setting. Semi-structured in-depth interviews with key senior journalists and editors provide specific information on comparisons between the distinctive practices of their own organisation. In particular these show how the ideal of democracy can be used as a tool of persuasion as much as a method of deliberation.

Pacific Journalism Review : Twenty years on the front line of regional identity and freedom

Pacific Journalism Review has consistently, at a good standard, honoured its 1994 founding goal: to be a credible peer-reviewed journal in the Asia-Pacific region, probing developments in journalism and media, and supporting journalism education. Global, it considers new media and social movements; ‘regional’, it promotes vernacular media, human freedoms and sustainable development. Asking how it developed, the method for this article was to research the archive, noting authors, subject matter, themes. The article concludes that one answer is the journal’s collegiate approach; hundreds of academics, journalists and others, have been invited to contribute. Second has been the dedication of its one principal editor, Professor David Robie, always somehow providing resources—at Port Moresby, Suva, and now Auckland—with a consistent editorial stance. Eclectic, not partisan, it has nevertheless been vigilant over rights, such as monitoring the Fiji coups d’etat. Watching through a media lens, it follows a ‘Pacific way’, handling hard information through understanding and consensus. It has 237 subscriptions indexed to seven databases. Open source, it receives more than 1000 site visits weekly. With ‘clientele’ mostly in Australia, New Zealand and ‘Oceania’, it extends much further afield. From 1994 to 2014, 701 articles and reviews were published, now more than 24 scholarly articles each year.

Rationality, governmentality, natio(norm)ality: Shaping social science, scientific objects, and the invisible

The discipline of education in Anglophone-dominant contexts has always grappled with a kind of status anxiety relative to other disciplines. This is in part due to the ways in which evidence has been thought about in the theoretico-experimental sciences relative to the ethico-redemptive ones. By examining that which was considered to fall to the side of science, even of social science, this paper complexifies contemporary debates over educational science and research, including debates over evidence-based education or assumed divisions between the quantitative/qualitative and empirical/conceptual. It reapproaches historical vagaries in discourses of vision that underscore the arbitrariness of approaches to social scientific research and its objects. A less-considered set of spatializations and regionalisms in social scientific conceptions of rationality especially are exposed through a close reading of the Harvard University philosopher William James' more marginalized texts.

Supporting the development and deployment of sustainable energy technologies through targeted scientific training

Sustainable energy technologies rely heavily on advanced materials and modern engineering controls. These promising new technologies cannot be reliably deployed without ensuring that there is a sufficient “capacity,” i.e., trained technical personnel with the expertise to implement, monitor, and maintain the energy infrastructure. This same capacity is critical to the local development of new technologies, especially those that respond directly to regional priorities, strengths, and needs. One way to build capacity is through targeted programs that integrate the training and development of locals at an advanced technical level. In practical terms, these programs usually produce a small number of highly educated individuals with skills in science and engineering. The goal of Part VI of this book is to highlight contributing factors in successfully operating capacity building programs.