Was there much blood kid? : cadet journalists in Australian media

This thesis established the ways in which novice journalists formulate their own professional ideologies and identified the key influences in this process. The research focused on the dominant oral traditions operating within newsrooms and established the fundamental strengths and weaknesses of the current systems of training young journalists.

Changing newsrooms : a survey of journalists in Victoria, Australia

Anecdotal evidence suggests Australian journalism is changing. This study borrows from earlier studies carried out in the United States and Australia to gain a picture ofthe contemporQ/Y Australian journalist. This paper is based on a study carried out in the Australian state of Victoria in late 2007 and early 2008.

Damaging and daunting : female journalists’ experiences of sexual harassment in the newsroom

Female journalists’ experiences of sexual harassment are barely documented in the literature about Australian news journalism despite evidence of its ongoing prevalence. There have been some stories of harassment detailed in autobiographies by female journalists and the occasional article in the mainstream media about individual incidents, but it wasn’t until 1996 that a union survey provided statistical evidence of an industry-wide problem. That Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance survey found that more than half of the 368 female participants had experienced sexual harassment at work. In 2012, I conducted the largest survey of female journalists in Australia finding that there was an increased number of respondents who had experienced sexual harassment in their workplaces. In a bid to better understand female journalists’ experiences of sexual harassment, this paper analyses written comments made by survey participants in relation to key questions about harassment. It finds that most downplay its seriousness and do not make formal reports because they fear victimisation or retaliation. As a consequence, a culture of secrecy hides a major industry problem where many women believe they should work it out themselves and that harassment is the price they have to pay for working in a male-dominated industry.

In our own image? The socialisation of journalism`s new recruits

This paper examines the role of a key group of primary refiners in the socialisation of new entrants to journalism: that is, the trainers, generally called cadet counsellors or editorial training managers. While the paper highlights the historical and structural tensions still current in the training of young journalists in Australia, it identifies the two main determining forces as technology and the increasingly virulent commercial imperative driving modern journalism. This paper also taps into continuing and current debates surrounding accreditation and professionalism. It confirms the fundamental identity crisis for trainers: should they confirm and consolidate current practice or be innovators and catalysts for change within the newsroom?

Finite element simulations of the cyclic elastoplastic behaviour of copper thin films

A large-scale computational and statistical strategy is presented to investigate the development of plastic strain heterogeneities and plasticity induced roughness at the free surface in multicrystalline films subjected to cyclic loading conditions, based on continuum crystal plasticity theory. The distribution of plastic strain in the grains and its evolution during cyclic straining are computed using the finite element method in films with different ratios of in-plane grain size and thickness, and as a function of grain orientation (grains with a {1 1 1} or a {0 0 1} plane parallel to the free surface and random orientations). Computations are made for 10 different realizations of aggregates containing 50 grains and one large aggregate with 225 grains. It is shown that overall cyclic hardening is accompanied by a significant increase in strain dispersion. The case of free-standing films is also addressed for comparison. The overall surface roughness is shown to saturate within 10 to 15 cycles. Plasticity induced roughness is due to the higher deformation of {0 0 1} and random grains and due to the sinking or rising at some grain boundaries.

Raat Ki Rani : nightclubs, vamps and urban transgressive spaces in Hindi cinema

This paper considers how city spaces in Hindi cinema have repeatedly been viewed as sites of transgressive sexual experience, particularly via representations of female sexuality in nightclubs and the flagrant performances of the women or ‘vamps’ that inhabit them. Emerging in Hindi cinema in the 1950s, and becoming a staple in films of the 1960s and 1970s, the ‘vamp’ became synonymous with unrestrained sexuality and the immorality of the city. The dichotomy between the idealised, bucolic, timeless village and the city as an icon of degenerate modernity was repeatedly seen in Hindi cinema, and the strongest signifier of this urban immorality was the ‘vamp’ who was seen as an outsider, and connoted urban vice, excess and desire. By and large the actresses that played ‘vamps’ (such as the blonde haired and blue eyed Helen) were of ‘Western’ appearance. The cabaret and nightclub were thus seen as being ‘Western’ in origin. This paper discusses how this was perhaps a response to colonial and Orientalist stereotyping, where the ‘Indian’ woman and the ‘Western’ woman operated as binary oppositional structures. Such oppositions were clearly present in nightclub dance performances, which were full of meaning to the cinematic audience, who would be able to ‘read’ the seductive, gyrating and explicit movements. This paper decodes examples of the movements in these ‘decadent’ performances, as it was through these movements and performances that the ‘westernised vamp’ became firmly located in urban transgressive spaces, closely tied with national anxiety about the depravity of city spaces.

Role of shot length in characterizing tempo and dramatic story sections in motion pictures

Motivated by existing cinematic conventions known as film grammar, we proposed a computational approach to determine tempo as a high-level movie content descriptor as well as means for deriving dramatic story sections and events occurring in movies. Movie tempo is extracted from two easily computed aspects in our approach: shot length and motion. Story sections and events are generally associated with changes in tempo, and are thus identified by edges located in the tempo function. In this paper, we analyze our initial founding of the tempo function on the basis that the distribution of both shot length and motion in movies is normal. Given that the distribution of shot length is approximately Weibull as confirmed in our experiments, we examine the impact of modelling and modifying the contributions of shot length to tempo. We derive an appropriate normalization function that faithfully encapsulates the role of shot length in tempo perception, and analyze the changes to the story sections identified in films.

Detecting indexical signs in film audio for scene interpretation

In this paper, we study the sound tracks in films and their indexical semiotic usage by developing a classification system that detects complex sound scenes and their constituent sound events in cinema. We investigate two main issues in this paper: Determination of what constitutes the presence of a high level sound scene and inferences about the thematic content of the scene that can be drawn from this presence, and classification of environmental sounds in the audio track of the scene, to assist in the automatic detection of the high level scene. Experiments with our classification system on pure sounds resulted in a correct event classification rate of 88.9%. When the audio content of a number of film scenes was examined, though a lower accuracy resulted with sound event detection due to the presence of mixed sounds, the film audio samples were generally classified with the correct high-level sound scene label, enabling correct inferences about the story content of the scenes.

Screening women’s complicity in the holocaust : the problems of judgement and representation

This essay analyses the representation of female perpetrators in Holocaust fiction films, particularly in relation to the persecution of prisoners in the Nazi camps. The screening of women in general, and female perpetrators in particular, is shown to be problematic due to their frequent marginalisation and the gendered, voyeuristic ways in which women's bodies are often objectified in Holocaust films. While the actions of female perpetrators and their depiction in films pose acute problems of judgement and representation that need to be acknowledged, it is argued that films have the potential to effectively explore the issue of women's complicity in the Holocaust.

Re-mapping class and caste consciousness: short narratives of South Asian diaspora in Australia

Thanks to Bollywood, a Non-Resident Indian (NRI) is predominantly imagined, back home in India, as super-rich, fully westernized in manners and doing India proud in foreign lands. One reason for this as explained by renowned Bollywood producer-director Late Yash Chopra, in his address at the first Pravasi Bharatiya Divas (Expatriate Indians Day) in 2003, is that as a director he is also working as a ‘historian’ and carrying on his shoulders the ‘moral responsibility [ … ] to depict India [and the Indian Diaspora] at its best’. In this regard, Ghassan Hage also notes that the ‘last thing’ the migrants (particularly men) would like to share with their families back home is shocking stories about racism, discrimination or prejudices that they may have experienced in public or the workplace. Such a revelation would obviously be followed by ‘why did you make us suffer and move to the end of the world just to get demeaned and insulted?’ Hage further notes that therefore the migrants’ familial and class experiences, be it in films, literature or even some sociological studies, are often ‘portrayed as a positive experience’ and this is ‘how the whole migratory enterprise continues to legitimise itself’'. It could be argued that this is one of the reasons the alleged ‘racist’ attacks against Indian students received so much attention in the Indian media. It was not just discrimination but the notion of discrimination and second class treatment (based on skin colour and origin) against the revered and much envied diasporic Indian that created such a media furor in India.

Rejecting the ‘F-word’: How ‘feminism’ and ‘feminists’ are understood in the newsroom

Feminist media scholarship in the past 30 years has focused on the representation of women in the media while an understanding of those who produce the representations has received little attention. In this article I am concerned with how some Australian journalists understand and experience the social/political movement of feminism and its advocates, feminists, as news sources and colleagues. I particularly focus on fleshing out how female journalists and those who identify as feminist discuss, negotiate, compromise and sometimes ‘survive’ a masculine newsroom culture. Moreover, I ask why it is that male and female journalists in my interviews — feminist-identified or not — resist or reject embracing or using the terms ‘feminism’ and ‘feminist’ in the context of the newsroom. A decade ago, Kay Schaffer astutely noted that feminism had become a ‘scare word’ in media discourse. I take this idea a step further by analysing more broadly how some journalists talk about ‘feminism’ and ‘feminists’.

Mothering siblings: Diaspora, desire and identity in American born confused Desi

In this essay we consider the construction of cultural identity, motherhood and the family in ABCD, a film of the Indian diaspora that had its world premiere at the 2001 London Film Festival. This film reads family, apparently within familiar narrative structures such as the U.S.-immigrant story, as portrayed in films like Goodbye, Columbus and My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and the "leaving home" story, as classically portrayed in Pride and Prejudice, where a young person needs to escape from her clueless family. The irritating presence of the mother in the film, and the quickness with which her two children appear to make life-determining decisions following her death, seem to invite discussions of plot and character organized around ideas of individual development, self-improvement and understanding. This is the territory of the desire plot, an account of family history captured for the twentieth century by Freudian-Lacanian readings which position sexual desire within the unconscious history of familial fantasies, understood as vertical and Oedipal. In this territory, mothers and old ladies become, as Mary Jacobus memorably phrased it, little more than "the waste products" of a system in which marriageable women are objects of exchange between men (142) and a mother's death would be expected to grease the wheels of narrative. Identity and narrative are inextricably linked here: a certain understanding of narrative as developmental and teleological paves the way for an understanding of identity as either/or. There are problems, however, in trying to read ABCD as a bildüngsroman structured by what Susan Freidman calls "the temporal plots of the family romance, its repetitions and discontents" (137), rendering the "Indian" characteristics of the plot unreadable, and the apparently self-defeating nature of the characters' choices and behavior, rather pointless. A central [End Page 16] difficulty is that the film both responds to and resists readings based on the Oedipal model of the bildüngsroman with its focus on linear development through time.

Blokey' newsrooms still a battleground for female journalists

This paper reports on the largest survey of female journalists in the Australian news media. The goal was to investigate issues confronting women, including the extent of perceived gender discrimination in promotion, job segregation and working conditions. It is the first quantitative research of its type in 16 years, building on a smaller survey by the Australian media industry union, the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) and the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ). That 1996 report found there was significant gender discrimination in Australian newsrooms and that sexual harassment, in particular, was a systemic problem. This 2012 online survey of 577 female journalists working across all media platforms in metropolitan, regional, rural and suburban news media organisations demonstrates that little has changed. The paper compares and contrasts key data from the 2012 and 1996 surveys to ascertain the challenges still evident for female journalists.

Moving images effective teaching with film and television in management

This book will inspire academics, teachers and trainers to use film and television in their classrooms and to shows them how it might be done. It brings together respected international scholars who recount their experiences of how they have used moving images in their classrooms (defined widely to include distance-learning) with their explanations of why they chose this method of teaching and how they put their intentions into action. The book also illustrates how particular subjects might be taught using film and television as an inspiration to demonstrate the range of opportunities that these media offer. Finally, this book considers some of the practical issues in using film and television in the classroom such as copyright, technology, and the representation of reality and drama in films. This is a 'practical, how to' book that answers the questions of those people who have considered using film and television in their classroom but until now have shied away from doing so. The opportunity to see how others have used film effectively breaks down psychological barriers and makes it seem both realistic and worthwhile.