Australian Journalism Review - Volume 41, Issue 2, 2019

This article outlines an academic development programme at Sky Sports News (SSN), a 24-hour rolling news television channel in the United Kingdom. The course counters negative industry perceptions of journalism education. It demonstrates that a major news organization and a significant employer of sports journalists in the United Kingdom considers that academia has an important role to play in the professionalization process. SSN’s commitment to resourcing such a programme should also be seen as an attempt to raise professional standards and overcome the derogatory ‘toy department’ reputation that has hampered sports journalism. This article outlines how industry professionals are connected to academic learning and encouraged to critically reflect on their practice. The article intends to raise awareness of the programme across contexts and countries and, in doing so, provide a blueprint for similar industry-academic collaborations.

Australia’s major sporting codes proudly promote the fact that almost 40 per cent of their fans are women, however, this gender balance is not reflected in the composition of the media workforce covering sport. Further, there is very little mainstream media coverage of women’s sport and female athletes in Australia. However, the advent of digital media and lower barriers of access into the media market have led to a proliferation of women creating independent sports media; that is, media produced outside newsrooms by individuals who are not professional journalists. These products, which mostly comprise websites and podcasts, focus on sport generally and women’s sport and female athletes more specifically. These products have regularly secured accreditation to cover events and interview talent, an indication they have been accepted into the sports media landscape, and have started to develop significant audiences. This study conducted in-depth qualitative interviews to explore who these women are, why they create digital sports media products and whether they believe they are practising journalism.

Sports leagues and teams have entered the media industry, producing news content about themselves for broad consumption. The content producers behind these stories still largely position themselves as journalists, despite their lack of independence. They do so by engaging in boundary work, a process in which professional authority is won by enlisting other stakeholders in recognizing an occupational group’s jurisdiction over a societal task. While much of the debate over in-house reporting focuses on acceptance within the journalistic community, readers are also an important and underexplored stakeholder. This textual analysis of reader response to in-house coverage of athlete protest suggests that fans may respond to this content in ways that contest the commercial mission of a team website. As such, readers may be drawing their own boundaries in a media system with in-house content producers, and scholars should explore these questions.

Once rare, staff-supervised, student-produced publications are now common in Australian journalism programmes. This trend owes something to the consolidation of journalism education, but also much to two intersecting developments: the decline in the scale of the mainstream news media has opened up reporting deserts that journalism programmes, their staffing complements bolstered by journalists who have taken redundancy packages from mainstream outlets, have stepped in to water. This article reports the results of a national survey of journalism educators responsible for staff/student publications and discusses the implications of these publications. The survey respondents report strongly favourable educational outcomes for their students. They also report universities’ tardiness in adequately resourcing the editing and supervision time needed to transform student work submitted for assessment into publishable stories.

This article examines two key components of the Australian Government’s data surveillance framework and critiques their impact on journalistic confidentiality. The 2015 mandatory data retention scheme and the 2018 telecommunications industry assistance scheme have been the subjects of considerable controversy and ongoing parliamentary reviews. The combined effect of these provisions is that journalists are unable to confidently fulfil their ethical obligation to maintain source confidentiality. The article recommends targeted reforms to more explicitly and appropriately balance the public interest in journalistic confidentiality (and relatedly, democracy, public accountability and the rule of law) against law enforcement and national security objectives.

Tertiary educators across the globe are trying to identify the best way for students to complete their studies in a unit that synthesizes learning to date and prepares them to enter the workforce. The final unit, or capstone, has increasingly emerged as a key issue in higher education in recent years, and is the subject of a growing body of research. However, researchers have not reached consensus about the most suitable model for a capstone unit. The absence of a uniform approach is pronounced within the field of journalism education, where capstone units are not universal and a number of models are being used. In Australia, research has found that most undergraduate journalism programmes include a capstone unit, but that there are three models: the internship, the newsroom simulation and the project. The aim here is not to argue that one model is more effective than and preferable to others. Instead, this study contributes to the capstone literature by outlining student responses to a new project model capstone unit for journalism undergraduates at a Western Australian university. It evaluates the unit’s effectiveness against the stated purposes and principles of a capstone experience, and concludes that the project can achieve the dual aims of enhancing disciplinary skills and developing broader transferable abilities.

The digital revolution is changing the way investigative journalists find, hold and verify information. The methods used by investigative journalists are often kept secret from others, but in this research, fourteen leading investigative reporters and news workers revealed how they found, verified and published news coverage that led to sociopolitical change in Australia. The key ingredient was improved connectedness via one or more networking methods including social media platforms; web-based communication technologies such as Skype and e-mail; reporter collaborations and media outlet collaborations. Despite the perception of a headlong rush to adopt digital technologies, this study found that leading reporters either rejected them or were cautious about adopting them. It found that reporters value their analogue techniques and, while a few were keen or very keen to explore new possibilities, many were reluctant or afraid of the perceived risks of digital technologies. This article reveals the specific digital technologies used by leading Australian reporters that have made their work faster, easier and more incisive in calling the powerful to account in the public sphere. In each case, reporters who experimented with new techniques found that the power of the technologies they used resulted in coverage that yielded much more significant outcomes than they had envisaged. The coverage also attracted national recognition in the form of peer-selected industry awards.