Andrew Dodd

Working for less: the aftermath for journalists made redundant in Australia between 2012 and 2014

ABSTRACT While media organisations continue to lay off journalists in Australia, the long-term outcomes of mass redundancies are just beginning to unravel. A key finding from a survey sample of 225 Australian journalists who exited their jobs between 2012 and 2014 is that while just over 60% of respondents continued to work wholly or partly in journalism roles, income loss was significant across the board. This is partly explained by the precarity of work experienced by many participants post-redundancy. But lower incomes were also noted amongst those who remained in full-time journalism positions: indeed, those who moved to full-time roles in other professions were likely to be earning more. Meanwhile, the finding that those aged over 50 faced the most significant drop in income points to particular problems faced by older workforce participants.

UniPollWatch:: A model for cross-campus political journalism education

The 2014 UniPollWatch project brought together the journalism schools of four Victorian universities to cover the 2014 state election. The project was a unique experiment in political journalism ed...

The Australian's Media Supplement: A Lapdog, a Watchdog, an Attack Dog or All of the Above?

The modern news media comprise powerful institutions that require the kind of scrutiny they direct towards other influential institutions. The 50th anniversary of The Australian offers a timely opportunity to examine how fairly and accurately the national daily newspaper has reported on its parent companys strengths and weaknesses, and those of its commercial rivals, as well as covering overall trends in the media industry. The article argues that when The Australians Media section began in 1999, it substantially expanded for readers the available range of news and views about the media. However, the section never reached its advertising revenue targets and in recent years has lost much of the revenue it once had. Over the past decade, the section has become increasingly narrow-minded in the range of its coverage, tone and approach.

The pedagogy of the UniPollWatch pop-up journalism project

The journalism schools at 28 Australian universities joined forces to provide coverage of the 2016 federal election. The UniPollWatch (UPW) 2016 project was the biggest collaborative university journalism project ever undertaken in Australia. UPW reflects several trends in journalism education. It exemplifies teamwork and embodies the most authentic aspects of experiential learning and industry engagement. In so doing, it boldly asserts that the academy and journalism schools can—and should—provide high quality reportage for the benefit of general audiences. While UPW first set out to provide a ‘teaching hospital’ style venue for real world publication of student work, its pop-up online nature imbued it with potential to meet the aims of more recent best practice models of journalism education. The participating universities were free to decide how they engaged their students with the project, what content they wanted to create for it and how they wanted to prepare and debrief their students. Some offered it as a voluntary extra-curricular activity, while others embedded it in courses and made the work compulsory and assessed, some used it as a minor assessment and others dedicated whole units to it. This article details the variety of teaching methods employed by the different participating universities, using a framework of the pedagogical models applied to contemporary journalism education.

Proyek Sepaham: An Experiment in Cross-cultural and Collaborative Journalism Education

Proyek Sepaham, or Project Understanding, brought together staff and students at the journalism schools at Swinburne University in Melbourne, Australia, and Universitas Multimedia Nusantara in Tangerang, Indonesia, for an exercise in cross-cultural journalism education in which each university separately wrote feature stories and produced multimedia reports in response to questions provided by the other university’s students. The questions reflected topics about which the students felt they lacked understanding about the other country. Once the questions were exchanged, the students produced journalism for readers at the other country’s university, seeking to generate greater understanding of the topics concerned. The results were then published on two inter-connected websites under the banner Proyek Sepaham. This paper explores the nature of the collaboration and discusses the key lessons learnt about the design and scope of the project and its practical day-to-day operation. It also considers how the model might be improved for future collaborative exercises.