Shawn G Burns

Media coverage of sport for athletes with intellectual disabilities: The 2010 Special Olympics national Games examined

In April 2010, Adelaide hosted the IXth national Special Olympics – a sporting event for athletes with intellectual disabilities. This article explores how the print media covered the Games. In particular, our interest is in the language adopted by reporters to describe the athletes and their performances. We were interested to see whether journalists adopted sporting language in their accounts of performances or, alternatively, adopted language that focused on the individual athletes disability. The article explores a number of issues surrounding media coverage of sport for people with disabilities, including the extent to which media organisations perpetuate stereotypes about disability and whether this, if established, links back to the medias reliance on traditional news values.

The Politics of Representing Disability Exploring News Coverage of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the National Disability Insurance Scheme

Twenty-five years on from the implementation of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), media representation of people with disability has become even more significant. More recently, the implementation of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) in Australia has placed people with disability, and the issues they face, at the forefront of political discourse. This study looks at the media coverage of the ADA and the NDIS as significant social and political landmarks in their respective countries. Using content analysis, this article explores how media representations of people with disability are substantial factors within social reform, societal inclusion and equal rights. Because of numerous barriers to participation in many countries, people with disability may only be known to the larger society through media representations. Disability rights-focused news coverage is important to a society’s awareness of disability issues, so this research contributes to a better understanding of how political issues regarding people with disabilities play out in two countries’ news media.

Experiential Learning in the Social and Mobile-first Student Newsroom

This paper is an exploration of student feedback to their participation and learning in the social and mobile-first multimedia newsroom run as part of the Bachelor of Journalism degree at the University of Wollongong, Australia. The paper draws on student responses to an online survey carried out in the wake of the final-year newsroom subject. Acknowledging one of the main aims of journalism, newsroom curriculum is to present ‘real-world’ experiences as authentically as possible. The paper explores the student observations in the context of a changing news media landscape, and the need for journalism education to remain relevant and contemporary.

Diversity and journalism pedagogy: exploring news media representation of disability

This essay explores disability studies in broadcast journalism education and seeks to help answer a question faced by teachers: Does the material discussed in class make a difference in their lives, including how they approach their work? This essay draws on a case study of university broadcast journalism students who took part in classes that explored the representation of people with disability (PWD) in the media. It looks at whether diversity studies are relevant to the post-university lives of journalism students and whether it has affected the way they report about PWD.

The role of special edition editorials in forging and maintaining links between newspapers and the communities they serve

Abstract Successful newspapers manage to carve out a niche for themselves with the communities they seek to represent, often appealing to what they perceive as the particular needs and interests of prospective readers. This is particularly evident in the case of newspapers in rural and regional communities that are in the early stages of development. This paper looks at the development of newspapers in two emerging communities, the Northern Territory and Tasmania’s north-west coast, during the late nineteenth century and explores how they use editorials to build and maintain their relationship with readers, both in their set-up period and during milestone events in their history.