Kayt Davies

Data Journalism Classes in Australian Universities: Educators Describe Progress to Date

This article examines the extent to which data journalism (DJ) is being taught in Australian universities. It presents the results of interviews with 35 journalism academics about how they are incorporating data journalism into their courses. It includes details about the types of data journalism skills they are teaching, the resources they are using and the hindrances that have met or are making it difficult to teach data journalism. These hindrances include low and varied levels of quantitative literacy and math aversion among students, lack of time for upskilling and limited room in their courses for new material. The study found that at least nine Australian universities have semester-long units dedicated to data journalism and that at least a further nine are teaching it via some lectures and activities. Almost all respondents thought more should be done to incorporate data journalism into the curricula. This article lays a foundation for future exploration of how data journalism could be incorporated into journalism programmes where the staff requires upskilling.

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.

For the lifestyle and a love of creativity: Australian students’ motivations for studying journalism

A number of studies have examined why students choose to study journalism at university, but overall, this area is still relatively underexplored. Yet, understanding why students choose journalism, and what career expectations they hold, is important not only for educators but also for wider society and public debates about the future of journalism and the value of tertiary journalism education. This article examines the motivations of 1884 Australian journalism students enrolled across 10 universities. It finds that hopes for a varied lifestyle and opportunities to express their creativity are the most dominant motivations among students. Public service ideals are somewhat less important, while financial concerns and fame are least important. These motivations also find expression in students’ preferred areas of specialisation (referred to in Australia as rounds): lifestyle rounds are far more popular than politics and business rounds or science and development rounds.

Journalism research in academia: The door is already open

Journalism is a well-established set of practices, underpinned by a distinctive theoretical perspective that fits the definition of a methodology (Lamble, 2004). It fits the NHMRC’s (2007, p. 2) definition of research because it is ‘of direct relevance to … the public’ and it ‘lead[s] to new or substantially improved insights’. But, there is some resistance within Australian academic bureaucracy, especially from Human Research Ethics Committees, to approve journalistic research designs that involve unwilling participants and rapid timeframes (Davies, 2014). This paper documents progress in this line of thought over recent years.

Evaluating a Police and Journalism Joint Training Initiative

In early 2010, the Edith Cowan University (ECU) journalism programme and the Western Australia Police Academy Detective Training School launched a novel collaboration that involved running joint training days, in which a ‘media pack’ of journalism students interview trainee detectives about mock crimes they have been tasked with investigating. The training improved the trainee journalists’ and detectives’ understanding about the constraints the other parties face. It also made them more confident about their ability to elicit and convey accurate information, and more willing to attempt to do so than before the training.  This article presents a description of the training days and the rationale behind them from detective and journalism educator perspectives, including the minimal costs involved in time and resources. It also presents the results of an evaluation, involving before-and-after questionnaires completed by participants. The article also reviews the scant literature about the dynamics of the relationship between journalists and detectives and suggests that training related to the dynamic is important for journalism students given that police public relations departments and polices are blossoming in Australia and throughout the Asia-Pacific region.