Denis Muller

Ethics and trauma: lessons from media coverage of Black Saturday

Covering Victoria’s ‘Black Saturday’ bushfires in February 2009 traumatised many of the media people involved, and confronted them with many difficult ethical dilemmas. These concerned access to the scene and to property, how to treat survivors and victims, how to choose what to publish and how to balance the competing pressures induced by editors, rivals, the authorities and the survivors and victims. The Centre for Advanced Journalism at the University of Melbourne, as its first research project, examined the experiences of media people who covered the fires, both at the fire ground and in studios and newsrooms. The research consisted of 28 in-depth semistructured interviews with volunteers who, in the end, came from many branches of news media and from a wide range of professional backgrounds: reporters, photographers, camera operators, video journalists, news desk personnel, editors and news directors. The term ‘media people’ is used to comprehend this range. The intent of the research was educative. Its purpose was to acquire material from which the profession, the authorities and the public might learn lessons about the effects of covering a major disaster close to home, and about how it might be done better in the future. It is not normative: it does not make judgments about the rightness or otherwise of individual instances of behaviour or the quality of the coverage. It allows the practitioners to tell their stories and make their own judgments. Through this, patterns emerge that suggest systemic ethical weaknesses as well as extraordinary humanity on the part of individuals. These are presented as conclusions. The emotional impact of covering the fires was obvious during the interviews. Few respondents got through the interviews without showing emotion – 3–6 months after the event. Some were kind enough to say afterwards that the interview had been helpful. The fieldwork was done by the author and by Mr Michael Gawenda, Director of the Centre for Advanced Journalism and a former Editor of The Age (1997– 2004). The findings were presented at a conference at the University of Melbourne on 19 November 2009. They are summarised here under five headings: access, treatment of people, maelstrom of pressure, deciding what to publish and emotional impact.

Assessing Students’ Social and Emotional Learning: A Review of the Literature on Assessment Tools and Related Issues

There is widespread acceptance of the benefits of social and emotional learning (SEL) curriculum in the educational context. However, the assessment of learning outcomes is not so clearly documented. This review compares SEL and the related constructs in three international settings, namely Australia, UK and USA, and then focuses on the assessment tools and practices used to examine SEL learning outcomes. To identify the assessment approaches used, multiple database searches were conducted. Boolean searches were conducted using the following terms: student, learning, assessment, resilience, perseverance, self-management, social emotional learning, personal, social capability, psychology of learning and learning outcomes. The database searches were limited to English-language scholarly articles in peer-reviewed journals published from January 1990 onwards. Eight key studies were examined in depth, which collectively reported on over 120 tools/instruments. Lessons learnt from these studies are detailed in the chapter. From the review, it is clear that there is no magic bullet for assessing SEL across all age groups. The choice of measures differs depending on the purpose of the assessment. In building an approach to assessment, there are eight key considerations that may be distilled from the literature. A number of suggestions are offered for future definition and assessment of SEL.

Understanding the civic impact of journalism: A realistic evaluation perspective

The importance of journalism to civil society is constantly proclaimed, but empirical evidence on journalisms impact, and how this operates, is surprisingly thin. Indeed, there is confusion even about what is meant by the term “impact”. Meanwhile, the issue of the role of journalism is becoming increasingly urgent as a consequence of the rapid changes engulfing the news media, brought about by technological change and the flow-on effect to the traditional advertising-supported business model. Assessing the impact of journalism has recently been the topic of debate among practitioners and scholars particularly in the United States, where philanthropists have responded to the perceived crisis in investigative journalism by funding not-for-profit newsrooms, with resulting new pressures being placed on journalists and editors to quantify their impact on society. These recent attempts have so far failed to achieve clarity or a satisfactory conclusion, which is not surprising given the complex web of causation within which journalism operates. In this paper, the authors propose a stratified definition of journalistic impact and function. They propose a methodology for studying impact drawing on realistic evaluation—a theory-based approach developed primarily to assess large social programmes occurring in open systems. The authors argue this could allow a conceptual and methodological advance on the question of media impacts, leading to research capable of usefully informing responses at a time of worrying change.

SEL Approaches that Have Worked: A Case Study of the Role of Formative Evaluation

Over three years, Catholic Education Melbourne introduced an Initiative to alter the way social and emotional learning (SEL) was incorporated into Melbourne’s Catholic systemic schools. The Initiative was subjected to a process of formative evaluation by the authors of this chapter. The process of formative evaluation influenced the development of the Initiative over the three years and provides a case study in how it can be used to yield contemporaneous data on the implementation of a new policy in a way that allows the implementation to be continually improved. This chapter recounts how formative evaluation was carried out and its effects on the implementation of the SEL Initiative. Additionally, it highlights key elements of successful SEL implementation.

A new symbiosis? Opportunities and challenges to hyperlocal journalism in the digital age

This article draws on ‘hyperlocal’ journalism scholarship to explore the civic functions of Australian local reporting in the digital age. Through place-based case studies based on interviews with media and civic leaders from three disparate communities, we find community groups are engaging with social media, particularly Facebook, to connect locals to services and community news. Community service providers are increasingly adept at using social media and, in many cases, prefer it to legacy media to gather, disseminate and exchange news. Concurrently, legacy media have lost newsroom resources that limit their practice of ‘shoe leather’ journalism and increase their dependence on official sources without independent verification. Yet, journalists are adapting to newsroom cutbacks by forming symbiotic relationships with non-media news providers, including local police. We find there are promising alternatives for fostering civic discourse and engagement through digital technologies despite less traditional local news and a reduced capacity for verified journalism.