Donny Recommends: Lecture screening - "Page One: Inside the New York Times"

Who would have known while we are aspiring to become a journalist, we can also indulge ourselves into being a little bit of a film critic? For this week's lecture, the whole lecture room has moved to the Schonell Theatre, where we are very honoured to participate in a premiere screening of "Page One: Inside the New York Times", a fascinating documentary about several issues in journalism.

While we are watching it, I couldn't help but think of how many issues exactly that the film has covered. I believe there are almost 10 of them, covering in a variety of topics like media reporting, plagiarism, the current media landscape, blog-like journalism, being a foreign correspondent in the war-torn Middle East, bad outcome of evil news business, and many things that surrounds the history of the New York Times.

In the film, we get to understand how they write news, personally I found it not surprising, but breathtaking that they have to write almost 5000 words for a featured topic; how they have meetings on what to put on the front page, and looked at how pessimistic other people working on alternative media see the traditional, and declining newspaper industry.

We also followed David Carr, who was a cocaine addict but turned journalist in the New York Times, his interviews are sublime and outstanding, and most of the time, funny because of his cheeky personality. His prominent role in the film helps me understand his role as a journalist is very important on informing and uncovering truths behind the shades, in this case, the scandals surrounding the ex-CEO of Tribune Company, Randy Michaels (NYT feature by David Carr), about his misconducts towards colleagues and sexism across the newspapers under the company.

This film is a must-watch, and since I'm not a professional movie critic I'm very good at writing details and opinions about this film, but I wholeheartedly recommend this movie for everyone, especially people who are interested about the news industry, because you'll never know anything about it until you've seen it.

D.

Focus: Lecture - Investigative Journalism

Another deep look at a very interesting topic of journalism - investigative journalism. Investigative journalism has a very crucial role to the news industry, because it acts as a medium to discover truth, to discover things people wouldn't normally know or see. We get to see the facts and opinions inside a certain topic or story, and we can identity lapses between media. One thing to point out though is that investigative journalism is distinctive from police investigation.

Bruce introduced us 5 "IN"s of investigative journalism:

• Intelligent: something that is well thought out, and how it fits into sinister things
• Informed: journalist is briefed on the facts, otherwise it will be missing out the story
• Intuitive: having a fresh mind
• Inside (intimate): something like a real story behind average media coverage, and sometimes getting into people's lives
• Invest: being an investigative journalist, you have to invest yourself into there, the whole scope, but still need to draw the line between good and bad moral values

Investigative journalism is a deep subject, and there are quite a few deeper meanings behind this name.

• Critical/Thorough: Journalists have to be an active participant of the investigation, the key idea of this is to have active intervention to a topic, and put in substantial effort to it
• Custodians of conscience: The investigation has to meet up to the society's moral view and give exposure to something bad, and let the public to observe and examine the issue
• To provide a voice for people without them: Public interest is the main objective and we need to give power for the powerless, and voice for the voiceless
• Watchdog/4th branch of the government: Looking at the doings of a government and ensure free flows of information that is needed for a democracy, the role of a function of democracy is important to interrogate judiciary, executive and legislature

An investigative journalist has to be like a "shoe leather", and standing back to see the big picture of the whole issue, and most importantly, take nothing for granted. Be always sceptical and do not believe in everything you see.

John Pilger, an Australian investigative journalist has a very nice sum-up for it: "It's not enough for journalists to see themselves as mere messengers without understanding the hidden agendas of the message and myths that surround it."

Interestingly, investigative journalism not only exist in the past as well, but they have done tremendously great deed to the society. It's like a trailblazers that leads us to the modern method of investigative journalism.

Several men throughout the history, like Edward Smith Hall, W.T. Stead, Bob Woodward, and surprisingly, Julian Assange has given breakthroughs towards the society. It is not like they have completely change the course of history, but major adjustments to the society like law change for the Age of Consent are made because of investigative journalism. And they helped uncovered some never-before seen and known facts and truth about the world, like what Wikileaks does to uncover the inner workings of governments.

Nowadays, we tend to do investigative journalism in a much more subtle, localised way. ABC's Australian Story is a prime example of this, the programme leads the audience to the daily lives of a normal person, and give us insights about something we might have overlooked.

However, we aren't always exactly sure about what we investigate. But there's an old journalism saying, "If your mother says she loves you, check it out." That means we have to check all the facts, assume absolutely nothing, and of course, don't trust whistleblowers as they might be misleading and sometimes, crazy even.

So, with all these knowledge we just learnt, how about something practical that we can apply to our jobs? There are several methods that are mentioned in the lecture, on different types of investigation interaction. Some of them are holding at a high moral standards, but some are just the opposite:

• Interview
• Observation
• Analysing documents
• Briefings
• Leaks
• Trespass
• Theft

However, with the advent of technology recently, we seemed to take Wikipedia and Google for granted. Easy, convenient access to information we need. However, this is of course not the case prior to their existence. Again, this goes back to the "not taking anything for granted".

So, what are the threats investigative journalism is facing?

One of them is being Online News. Because there are less money involved in the online news business, that means news companies may not be able to employ a lot of journalists, making less news and having less time, resulting in a lesser investigative journalism.

The other thing we fear is the "Public Relationship" field. PR is all about bonding the public with the clients and in this case, government or corporations. They provide selective facts just to give the public a persuasive image of themselves, putting all truths behind the bars. This is exactly the opposite we journalists would like to see. If PR continues to grow, we would result in a shrinkage of quality journalism. No exposure, dodging questions, massaging "talent", and cleaning up stories leave us no way to intervene and investigate. They are literally our "cause of death" in quality journalism.

But will the future of social media and paywall save us from all these nasty things? Probably, as I've said this several times before in the lecture blog entries, the audience is the most important part because if they prefer crap news and crap investigations, we can't help but falling into the culprit of horrible journalism. But if our audience wanted to be a well-informed, critical, and open-minded bunch of scholars, they can change the whole story.

D.

Focus: Lecture - News Values

It's a pity that I've missed the lecture due to some personal clish-clashes, but here it is!

What is "News Values"? What are the underlying factor that makes news, valuable? In this theory-oriented lecture, you'll be able to find it out.

In journalism studies, there are 4 categories to define News Values:

1. Impact
2. Audience Identification
3. Pragmatics
4. Source Influence

In short, News Values is "the degree of prominence a media outlet gives to a story, and the attention that is paid by an audience". So if a story is without any value, people will not care about it, and media outlets like newspaper will not use up a page to report it. Simple!

News are like a surprise present for readers every day because it gives us an impact on what happened during the day, and with their information we get to know everything around us.

But people are sometimes selfish, they wouldn't care about anything unless it is related to them. To make a news piece valuable, it has to locate its audience, to get them interested about what's happening in the world.

To make a story valuable, the ethics and practice on how to report it also makes it valuable or not. A journalist has to write in complete facticity, also not to mention about their ways of investigating the story, which could determine the outcome of it.

Public relations has a hateful relationship with journalism because of its influence to the neutrality of journalism. PR is done with controlling the facts and truth behind a client whereas journalism is practiced with true and factual reporting. For a journalist, it is very hard to get over the PR people to get the truth behind all the spinning stunts.

News Values are held differently across the globe, in which values are different between news services and cultures. However, there is a simple definitive value that we all use commonly:

Most newsworthy information will be put in the front

Important details are followed immediately

...finally, general information are put at the end

To put in perspective, it's like an up-side-down triangle, where the most eye-catching topics will be put forward, and leave in information by the end of a story, allowing audience to do their own follow up.

There are a few examples in the lecture which perfectly depicts how this works:

"If it bleeds, it leads!"

Simply meaning if something relates to death, injuries and crime, the story will instantly become "newsworthy"

"If it's local, it leads!"

For Brisbane, if a story is about local affairs like Footie, flooding, ongoing case of Daniel Morcombe and duck race fund-raising for cancer research, they all go straight onto the front page.

But how does an organisation/institution shape their own distinctive News Value? To be honest, this "sense of news value" is the first quality of editors because they determine how the news are reported and published, as told by Harold Evans, who worked as the editor of the Sunday Times from 1967 to 1981. And they have the job to filter anything unwanted and give out anything that is newsworthy.

Newsworthiness is an interesting topic that's mentioned in the lecture. It's included more than 12 kinds of News Values and each of those are associated with what kind of stories in nature they are. They include, but not limited to: negativity, closeness to home, recency, currency, continuity, uniqueness, and so on. Some news pieces can be in more than one news value, that means they are not mutually exclusive. The additivity, the complementarity, and the exclusion of a story also benefit itself into something newsworthy, and these are hypothesised by Galtung & Ruge. (hmm, researches are always done in a "partner" arrangement)

However, this is not universal, as other scholars have also hypothesised in another method in which news values are differently categorised. For example, Goldings & Elliot's News Values. But in general, they can be summarised as follows:

1. The power elite
2. Celebrity
3. Entertainment
4. Surprise
5. Bad news
6. Good news
7. Magnitude
8. Relevance
9. Follow-up
10. Newspaper agenda

So, what are the threats of News Values? In short, three main points:

• the bad, lazy and incompetent journalism;
• PR influence and the ensuing tabloidisation;
• and hyper-commercialisation.

These are the threats that makes news values not valuable anymore, in which people nowadays don't want to watch TV news, read newspapers and listen to radio because they think these journalist bastards are just reporting crap every day: they don't dig into the fundamental problems in the society, they don't inform us about concerns, they no longer provide an appropriate outlet to educate people on a certain issue.

But we can all change this by selectively choose our own trustworthy news outlets and be a sensible and well-informed reader. Even if the world has only one true, honest news company, we will follow them whether they may go.

D.

Focus: Lecture - Agenda Settings

In the previous weeks we had seen a lot of fancy stuffs on the surface in the world of news and Journalism, but in this week's lecture, we are getting serious and deeper and over the next 3 or so lecture we're going to talk about journalism studies. But today, we're delighted to be introduced on the very backbones of news reporting and a little bit of politics. It's called agenda setting.

Agenda setting, to say it in a few words, is something that is like a theory, but it's also obvious to everyone. It's usually set by news companies and corporations that deliver news to the public audience.

Did you know that our social life has the power to construct a complete different reality on top of its own? It's called Social Construction of Reality. Everyone's perception towards the reality is different, and we are usually influenced by the communication between people and the common language that we use every day. So in short, social life constructs the world as we see it and it mediates us to along on how to come to know and understand the world.

On the other hand, the media has provided a big step on fabricating the known world to us and we wonder... What does journalism has to do with these?

Well, before that, we have to understand that there are 4 different kinds of agenda:

1. Public agenda
2. Policy agenda
3. Corporate agenda
4. Media agenda

Each of them help contribute to the reality and getting the world to work in order. As per this course, we are going to focus on agendas that are important to journalists.

Usually, the more important an issue is, the media will report it in more coverage about it, therefore giving us an impression of priority. Of course, not every incident around the world can be simply reported on a 30-minute news bulletin, so as a journalist, we have to select a couple of news that is noteworthy to the public, and the selection they picked forms a "media reality", and combining with the reality as we've known since we are born, this comes down into the public media.

The big scope of Public Media

By doing this, we have the knowledge about certain things of a certain issue. Also, by doing this, mass media not only merely reflects the reality, but also helps shape and filter it, concentrate it into something we can digest every day.

Let's talk about a little bit of history. The whole idea of agenda comes from the 20s where a man called Harold Lasswell, believes that the mass media injects direct influence into the audience. But consider in that period, the only available sources of mass media are newspapers, radio, films and posters. It's pretty true by that time. But this doesn't stop there, Walter Lippmann in 1922 says that:

"the mass media creates images of events in our minds".

Fascinating. The important part of this quote is "image". Image gives us a big deal of impression about how reality portrays: not only how it works, but also how it represents inside our heads, something we remember dearly on a particular event like 9/11 attack. Also, the use of propaganda:

[...] "helps shape the images in the minds of human beings in support of an enterprise, idea or group. Propaganda can be used to substitute one social pattern or another."

He advised that even with all the critical thinking that helps us from truly judging things using the images in our head, the basis of it is to liquidate judgments, regain an innocent eye, disentangle feelings be curious and open-hearted. Such an influential man. And that means basically, we should not be gullible on things around us because we need to think, analyse and assess the world around us. Simply believing in the reality people shaped is not necessarily useful to our lives.

Well, for what it's worth, what does agenda setting do? What is its purpose?

There are two main levels for agenda setting. One's being the "what" for the public to focus on in the coverage, and the other being "how" for the public to think about the attributes of issues.

To simply highlight them, their purpose is to transfer important news from the new media to the public, to transfer important news for both the issue and other objects such as political figures, and to set the agenda for issue in other media.

Noam Chomsky has once said the real mass media is to simply diverting people from knowing everything, and get them to do something else. This concerns to the facts of media gatekeeping, in which the media controls the exposure of an issue and what is to be revealed next.

Also, the media also has to do something to advocate on a particular issue like promoting "ban smoking" and "AIDS prevention". They provide messages to the public to encourage them to educate themselves.

Being a constant source for audiences, the news agenda has to do cuts on particular topics to leave space for "new" news to come out. That's called agenda cutting. The truth of the world is not represented quite clearly in front of the public (not all the time), and people might be thinking the reality is not as bad as it sounds.

News comes out so suddenly at times where people tend to freak out, one example is when the US President Barack Obama announces the death of Osama Bin Ladin, and the whole world screams out their throats and celebrate on the streets. But look at the time and day when the news is announced. It's on the weekends, and it's at night where everyone is chilling at their homes and places. The decision is made through the diffusion of news, it takes care of when, where and how which an important event is communicated to the public.

An issue can be multifaceted and can be portrayed as several different perspectives, the way how media's portrayal of an issue will often influence the public on how they perceive the message. It can be portrayed in a good side, but it can also be in a bad side. For instance, people's perception towards Indigenous Australians are not constantly in a same form, as some might see them as druggies and thugs, while other sees them as hard-working learners that want to make a change for their communities.

With all these theories going on in the agenda, it does not necessarily represented perfectly in real life as some media consumers might not be as well-informed as others, and some has biased standpoints as others. Also, for those who has made up their minds of standing in which part of the opinion-conitnuum, the news reports will do minimal effect on them.

However, with the recent changes in the news and journalism industry, take 24-hour news cycle for example, the news agenda will not be constant all the time - it changes depending on different situations. It has done a great deal for daily newsreader because not only they can follow the news in real-time, they do not need to make a big sacrifice on changing their stances as a news develops. Politically speaking, the change of agenda setting has the use of pulling pollies into different parts of a chess table, in which the media agenda will manipulate them into doing different roles and having different opinions, help politicians to decide what is important in the community. It definitely affect what they would say and promise during their campaign, and that, in short, the media agenda somehow sets the "agenda" for the campaign.

With such a deep influence to the public as well as different classes of people in the society, agenda setting has undoubtedly creates a whole new dimension of the world where everything is filtered and diluted into a rather unrealistic point-of-view towards the world. Seems like the news has done quite a change to human minds as well. Great lecture!

D.

Focus: Lecture - Public Media

To contrast with last week's lecture about commercial media, we looked at the complete opposite of it, and it's called public media.

But first, in honour of my city, let's take a look at the public media in Hong Kong.

Back in Hong Kong, the only public media organisation I know of is Radio Television Hong Kong, or RTHK in short. They have produced so much interesting contents and feature for the viewers and listeners alike. Not only that, they also help produce education TV programmes with the Education Bureau for primary school students and they used to put them on-air every weekdays. However, they now distribute them online instead of broadcasting on television. RTHK also produce and broadcast programmes and meetings happening in the Legislative Council Building, the place where politicians debate about many issues in the Hong Kong society.

So. What is public media? According to the lecture, it is a media that aims to serve and engage a public, and they support public and the progress of democracy. Every public media should have a public value, a so-called 'public service ethos'. The productions of public media should also of value of public's fee that has given to them, in the case of Australia, it would be taxpayer's money. Not only that, in order to provide high standard content, they have to listen to the public audience as well: they need consultation that is opened to public. They receive fundings mostly from government through taxpayers' money.

The key mechanism of public media is mostly news and current affair (a.k.a. CAFF). The styles on reporting news are mostly serious and very precise, and they tend to not trying to attract audience since they see importance and unbiased standpoint as top priority. Their news are very considered, breaking news usually need to be verified and checked before publishing. However, not everything about public media is news and things happening every day. The programmes they produced can be very entertaining and useful as well. Such as comedies, education, history, entertainment, and everyday life topics (e.g. cooking shows and etiquette). In some countries, they also have the duty to spread propaganda.

Putting side by side with the commercial broadcasting media in Australia, there are 2 main public media organisations in this continent. ABC and SBS. They both broadcast on radios, televisions and online. ABC is the nation's first public broadcasting network. They provide very highs standard news bulletin and discussions, as well as different kinds of contents for audience from toddlers (Giggle and Hoot) to old fellas (Antique Roadshow), while SBS is a multicultural branch that passes intercultural harmony and understanding between each other. They also broadcast foreign news programme from other places in the world, such as Italy and Russia.

Opening shops help generate revenue
to produce high quality content

Sometimes, public media organisations have more than one source of fundings. They would commercialise and sell programmes in DVD and merchandises through their shops. Not only that would help ease the operation of public media, it also provides more resources for them to produce more high quality contents as well.

I think even though commercial media has all the resources and money to create or purchase exciting and audience-driven shows, the inner value is still missing and in my opinion, they are not as honest as public media. Moreover, public media provide news and truth of current affairs that is unbiased, complete and sincere, I believe people should watch and listen more from them, other than watching stuffs that sometimes propagate on one-side's opinion and standpoint. Being a well-informed audience is important and applying their knowledge in everyday life is crucial for developing critical thinking and skills. It seemed like public media is not as boring as other people say at all!

D.

Focus: Lecture - Commercial Media

The topic for this week's lecture is commercial media. Well, as I came here from Hong Kong for the first day, I have already noticed difference between Hong Kong and Australia. The varieties of televisions, newspaper and radio channels are completely refreshing to me. For the first few weeks I have totally no idea on what time does the news starts, and what other interesting "content" does all those TV channels have. That took me quite a time to adjust and understand.

Australian media in a glimpse - Both commercial and public media

But in this lecture, I think our main focus is not about comparing which TV show is better, or which channel has more viewers. As a journalism student, we need to know the landscape of Australian media, no matter it be commercial or public. As well as the purpose of commercial media: why do they exist?

To me, the first thing I found in Aussie TV channels are huge promotions of whatever kind of products sold in supermarkets and department stores. They are, obviously, advertisements. Commercial media needs profits to maintain their day-to-day operation. That means they rely on advertisements to generate revenue. The revenue will be used to produce TV programmes, buying dramas, and all sorts of things we see on the TV screen. However, their business success is based on their credibility. If there is a chance that a commercial media did something wrong and their action was discovered by the viewers, they will quickly lose audience, and soon their business will flail.

Oh, don't forget other forms of media such as newspaper and radio. They are also important parts of the media landscape in Australia, as well as magazines, websites, sports news, etc. But for me, the interesting thing about these corporations is, they do literally everything: TV, radio, digital media publishing, tele-broadcasting... you name it. They can cover almost all kinds of media available for consumers in a single umbrella company. It's really fascinating to understand all the linkages made between one magazine and a broadcasting company.

So in brief, the main players in the industry are: 

• News Limited (Courier Mail, The Daily Telegraph etc.)
• Fairfax Media (Brisbane Times, The Sydney Morning Herald etc.)
• Nine Entertainment (Channel nine, major magazines, Ticketek etc.)
• WIN corporation (regional broadcasting, including TV and radio)
• Southern Cross Broadcasting (Free-to-air TV and radio)
• Seven West Media (Channel 7, The West Australian, Yahoo!7 etc.)
• Ten (Channel Ten, ONE, 11)

Apparently, I knew too little about all of these connection in companies, and this week's lecture has shown us so much about it. Looks like one day if I have a job in a newspaper company, that means I am also work for certain different company as well, or two, or even 3. Now, how cool is that?

D.

Focus: Lecture - Age of Web News?

This week's lecture, we took a ship into the recent changes regarding to the news industry, especially with the printed media like newspaper and magazines.

Back in the old times, people consume 'old' media like newspapers before the dawn of the TV age. People buy them almost every day and newspaper companies make profits with classifieds and advertisements. People in the industry once regard classifieds as 'the river of gold'. But since the world wide web has dominated the media-scape with unlimited possibility, the old media started to fade out to the back stage, and people prefer not to buy the newspapers since there are news on the web that is free-of-charge.

People turned to their computers whenever they feel need to.

The web itself has changed dramatically through the time as well. First, there is Web 1.0, where the web is purely information-oriented. Companies post information on their website, and people use Internet browsers read them. Without using hyperlinks and pure information, there wouldn't be much interaction involved.

Now though, we are standing on the ground of the Web 2.0 age, where people share information using services like Flickr, Facebook, etc. It becomes more social-oriented. People who browse the web also are the producers of certain materials like photos, music and videos, we are also called 'Prod-users' as coined by Axel Bruns as we both are contributors and consumers of Internet media.

In the coming future, or maybe even earlier than we think, we will be entering the age of Web 3.0, where the web becomes a unified knowledge base. Using meta-tagging and search engine, machines can understand sentences and interpret them into useful information that fetch back to us. Every piece of information that sends to users will be customised, tailored and localised to fit them as best as it can.

However, with all these changes on the Internet, what left alone are the old-age media. Newspaper became less significant compared to 20 or 30 years ago, since readers prefer to read all the news on the web. Also, since the information provided to the users are hyper-localised and centralised according to their interests and values, readers become more ignorant and they started to lack common sense and general knowledge of things around them.

People now tend to take 'free news' for granted, and they feel entitled to have it for free. This really hurt the news industry as they heavily relied on revenues from advertising and reader-contributed classifieds. Newspaper companies now have their own website for news for quite some time, but in the future, they could no longer survive if they continue to provide free news. So a rather drastic change is needed in order to provide quality journalism.

News companies like The Times in the UK has used a membership-based subscription for their website, where readers can pay for a certain amount of money to read in-depth news, columns and commentary that would have been available for free in the past. So that makes people who have membership to gain privileges while news companies can generate revenue alternative to traditional printed media with ads and classifieds.

Paywall might be the only thing that saves people from reading low-quality news and sketchy 'investigative journalism' where some dodgy journalists nowadays only rely social media like Twitter and Facebook to research topic, which is quite daunting. And I certainly hope that in order to maintain a high standard of journalism, news companies will take this seriously while providing premium content, since people would not pay for it if the already premium content are in low quality in general.

In addition to this, I have read this piece of writing earlier where the author discussed about where we were in regard to the connection between people and media, as well as provided a future perspective on where we will be. A quite thought-provoking article that made me realise how drastic changes had taken place in the recent past, especially in the media side. Have a read!

D.

Focus: Lecture - Ethics, Codes and Conduct

On this week's lecture, we took a look at how codes and ethics work in the journalism industry. Recently, the industry is criticised as one of the most prominent press in UK, News of the World, was exposed with phone hacking scandals. People questioned their morality and their codes of conduct, whether they have ever respect other's privacy and try to be in a honest news industry. However, they failed to do it.

Now, back to the lecture. Our guest speaker Dr. John Harrison showed us a couple of advertisements including printed form and TV ads. Then he asked us about how ethical or unethical one advertisement seemed to us. Of course, different students has their different views, and so did I. While I found some of the ads are funny, they tend to do it in a rather poor or, may I say, inferior way. The creators of the advertisements like to catch our attention by using shocking content and suggestive material. But of course, not every advertisement is shown in prime time or 'kiddie time' where children watches TV after school or before school. So, there is an existence of the regulation board. Their work is to categorise each advertisement into their suitable on-air window. For printed posters and billboards, they don't have much control over them as everyone who travel past them will look at them. So there is a ethical question that ponders us. How can we tell everything from:

Good and bad?

Ethical or Unethical?

Right from Wrong?

Right, so in the lecture, John introduced 3 main ethical theories to us, which are 'Deontology', 'Consequentialism', and 'Virtue ethics'. And I am fairly intrigued by how consequentialism works.

Consequentialism is all about getting the right outcome, no matter how we did it, and by any means the outcome is the most important thing we should take care of, and 'the greatest good for the greatest number'. Believing how News of the World has followed these rules so closely, they've done something so shocking in a dishonouring and demeaning way, leading to their closure. So, should we just do what we want and don't care about the consequences? A good question to think of.

p.s.: I think John is using a bit too much BLOCK LETTER AND I FOUND IT A BIT CONFUSING TO FOLLOW!!



D.

Focus: Lecture - Telling facts with Sounds

Unlike other lectures we've had in the previous weeks, this one was put online so we can go back home and listen to it whenever we want. It's so flexible for us but I kind of missed the "lecture" feeling where all students are gathering in the room and listen to the speaker. I reckon it's more fun that way.

So anyway, this week we're learning about telling factual stories with sound. Sound, as everyone knows, happened to be on TV, on radio, and now in podcasts. But to be precise this time we will going to learn only pure soundwaves - Radio and podcasts.

Radio itself is a completely different media to TV, where TV is usually where viewers sit on the couch and swtiching channels to see if anything interesting is on, it's more like the content comes to you across the distance. While radio is more like you're driving, you're having tea or something, you'll listen to the radio. You multitask while you're listening.

The important thing about this is to you have to make listeners feel included in the conversation, not just simply talk without anything getting the involved.

Radio shows often have interviews with special people, and as a host you have to be genuinely interested about the guest. Before starting the show, you've got to research and find out something about that person and let him know what to expect in the show, so he/she can be more relaxed and will trust you during the recording/live.

Radio shows has to be interesting, and it needs to encourage people to participate in the show. For example, ask questions on the show, and make it simple so you'll have a faster response from callers. But being a host, you must be standing in different viewpoints depending on your audience. Sometimes you've got to switch your opinion because your viewpoint does not always reflect the ones from the audience. So it's important to remember that.

As a host, your voice and pronunciation affects a lot of people so it is crucial for you to have a correct lingo to use. Or else listeners would feel the show was kind of alienating them.

There are so much to cover in this 2 radio segments and I just couldn't have learnt more from it. Minding you that radio is not dying, it's thriving and it is gradually shifting into a new form of audio - Podcasts. People would subscribe to them if they're interested on it, and radio shows are exactly where it comes from. So in the meaning time both platforms are blending in each other, it will be a fantastical media source for busy people and housewives.



D.

Focus: Lecture - Telling factual stories with pictures (Week 3)

I am a a big fan of photography, and I own a DSLR which I truly adore. I've learnt a lot about pictures and video editing in my past studies at TAFE, now that in today's class, Bruce has introduced us to the world of pictures in journalism.

The most immediate thing I found is, pictures are everywhere and basically they penetrates your magazines with all those glossy page of advertisements. Pictures, are around us. But how could something we take for granted will be as a part of journalism? Well, basically, the function of a picture is to document a moment or an object. No matter it is being used as billboards or news clip, they have the same purpose.

And throughout history from cave carvings to stained glasses in churches, they are all being used to learn about something, to be observed through our eyes. Since the advent of photography, more of these kind of pictures are blooming, especially for newspaper where in the past they were in plain text, and thanks to the invention of camera, they no longer needed to paint drawings themselves. They will get the picture with just a snap.

Powerful pictures can blew people's mind, like the famous Afghan Girl from Steve McCurry:

Afghan Girl

No one exactly knows when should he/she take a picture in the right moment, and this really depends on either that person's experience, and most of all, luck. If something doesn't happen at all, you won't even have a chance to take that picture.

In the 90s, as technology grows and develop as fast as a bullet train, there is photo-manipulation, edits. Sometimes these images has such an impact to the audience. But sometimes they distort our perspective to certain matters, one of them is self-esteem.

Bruce gave us an example of how ridiculous can a girl put on make-up, had her photo taken, put it into Photoshop, and turned out into a completely "optimised" and modified version of the girl.

From this...

To this...

It was an awe-inspiring lesson. Beside my past knowledge about photography, I think I've picked up a few tips from Bruce and hopefully I will be able to apply it to my photographic skills in the near future!



D.

Focus: Lecture - First lecture!! (Week 1)

Oh, I should have mentioned about the first week's lecture before the 2nd one! But well, the first lecture was started before the blog so here it goes!

The first lecture by Bruce was fun as. Mainly because for a rookie like me who hadn't even started to understand the basics of journalism, I found all the ideas and thoughts are fresh and provoking. My expectations before I took the course was so great and now it's even getting greater!

Here's a very brief quote from Henry R. Luce, who was an influential publisher, said, "I became a journalist to come as possible to the heart of the world." And I thought, hey, that is so true. The spirit of journalism is to get into the very fabric of social life, and telling people about it in every accurate fact possible. Understanding every aspect of the world, on how people connect and create a new story.

But with the recent years, so much noise is around journalism making it become a side-job or if you will, a dirty job. Tabloids, sensationalism, and gossip stories are, in my opinions, polluting the whole ecosphere of journalism, and I understand without them, people might not be interested on reading something that is originally boring and tedious. But for me, journalism is a very high standard profession and people shouldn't take the job lightly. I believe after this lecture, and of course after this course, I might learn a few things and reflect this in my mind.

Overall, I think it is a very fascinating class for me and I'm so lucky to be in one part of it!



D.

Focus: Lecture - with Rodney Chester (Week 2)

"Focus" is a section where I will dive in and take a look about something interesting for me, and will share about my interesting point-of-view as well. Have a good read!

Indeed, every student has to learn something after a lecture, and this time on my Monday lecture we were very delighted that Rodney Chester from Courier Mail, shared his views and thoughts about "telling factual stories with text"

So he's mentioned about things recently that technology is slowly replacing the traditional publishing format, such as newspaper. The advancement of technology and social media like Twitter, Facebook are shifting the news headline from newspapers to the Interwebs. Which I do very agree, since for myself I haven't been reading any newspapers since high school where there were concession-priced subscriptions available for students. And I remembered the last time I bought a newspaper in Australia was during the January floods where my favourite newspaper Courier Mail was all sold out, and leaving me no choice but to buy that bulky "The Australian". No offence though!

Well, besides that, he talked about many things about how to write a news article, and one of the most interesting part for me is that he told us about writing features. Students pointed out the "Inverted pyramid" is also one of the most interesting point about the lecture, but I beg to differ and I thought "features writing" is something more interesting for me.

For example, if you are a features writer, you might not be touching headline news often. Instead, you'll be walking around the street, observe people and see what they're doing and walk forward and ask for a story.

Everyone on the street has their own story to tell, and I found that quite fascinating. In these days, people on the street move so quickly to a point they have started to ignore other's presence. It's kind of sad but it's also true in this modern society where everyone is minding their own business a bit too much.

And Rod has mentioned about you have to be a very good observer and storyteller. Also, how to attract audience into reading your stories bit by bit, how to make them intrigued by the stories. Oh, and a "voice" of yourself has to be established and also, one thing that Bruce has pointed out, once you've established your "voice", people will recognise you, and they will start to "follow" you like how they do it on Twitter, but in a manner of reading your editorials, your written stories about ordinary people on the street.

Well, I've got more things to share, but I'll cut it short and I found this lecture really helped me on understanding the fundamentals about text-based writing. This is not fantasy-novel writing like Twilight saga and crap like those, journalism is all about facts, unbiased viewpoint toward a story.

Oh, I've got so much more to learn!! But fret not, Rod shared his best tips to us:

• READ A LOT;
• WRITE A LOT, and;
• IF YOU'VE GOT SOMETHING TO WRITE ABOUT DON'T POST TO TWITTER.

Write on paper instead, and like us modern peeps, write on blogs!



D.