Hard News: Quantum Faster
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Vague as hell (although I'm sure she is less so in her actual research). The Phelan piece was a lot more concrete and to the point.
Fair enough then. I'm over being (ahem) curmudgeonly about Phelan's paper, which doesn't mean I believe he has proved his point, still less questioned how own perspective or seriously considered why du Fresne or Trotter might think and write as they do.
What I did like about Thomas's paper is that she presented some actual evidence of a problem -- the students don't seem to know how to appropriately write a news story any more.
I'm less sure about her analysis of the problem: it occurred to me that the pastoral attentions of an experienced sub-editor might be a bigger influence on journalistic development than is presently acknowledged. Given the movement to outsource subbing by the big print publishers, that would be a problem. I recall the first story I got back from the subs -- certain illusions about my ability sustained damage.
In the case of the Media7 programme, Phelan correctly noted that it didn't quite match its billing, but ignored the event that the show did end up focusing on (an examination of the media where they forgot to invite journalists).
For Phelan the very question of "the sometimes uneasy relationship between journalism and academe" is itself the product of hegemon. But it's actually something that educators wrestle with all the time.
Liminal dude Jim Tucker on becoming director of the JTO in 2005:
Among [Tucker's] questions are: What are our high schools doing to turn students away from journalism as a hot career choice? Where is New Zealand's Bachelor of Journalism? Or our Master of Journalism programme? And who exactly should be teaching future journalists their craft - academics under pressure to do research or teachers with newsroom experience?
He says the major journalism schools are under pressure to take more students to help meet their ever rising costs. "What impact is that and the pressure for teachers to be academics having on the quality of journalism graduates? Is there significance in the outcome of last year's Qantas Journalism Student of the Year Award, which saw first and second go to two of the smallest schools in the country? One such result may mean nothing, but let's watch for a trend."
Tucker believes more work needs to be done to ensure that journalism training continues after graduates start in the industry: "I make that judgement from the appalling standard of writing I came across at the coalface of one of our major national newspapers last year. This was work produced by graduates from various J schools. It was poorly constructed, ignored basic grammatical rules, lacked clarity, was often unreadable."
People who teach journalists do worry about craft, and they have a right to.
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People who teach journalists do worry about craft, and they have a right to.
Of course, but nobody is saying we ought to stop teaching journalist how to write. At the same time, I don't think the standard of writing is what's wrong with journalism in New Zealand, the problems are a little more structural it seems to me. We are simply not well served by our commercial media, and we're not alone in this worldwide, by any means, but we shouldn't allow ourselves to think that it is normal and that all that we can aspire to is the same crap, but with better syntax and punctuation.
I'm reminded of somebody you once hosted in the Speaker section - Young his last name was perhaps - who mounted the most appalling defence of the Tony Blair legacy, saying among other things that the critics of Iraq should just get over it already. A couple of people, front pagers if my memory doesn't fail me, immediately chimed in to praise the eloquence and prose, making the obviously delibrate choice of ignoring the content, and how it was framed. Surely we can look at those things too?
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I'm reminded of somebody you once hosted in the Speaker section - Young his last name was perhaps - who mounted the most appalling defence of the Tony Blair legacy, saying among other things that the critics of Iraq should just get over it already. A couple of people, front pagers if my memory doesn't fail me, immediately chimed in to praise the eloquence and prose, making the obviously delibrate choice of ignoring the content, and how it was framed. Surely we can look at those things too?
Oh yeah: this one from Joseph Young. I didn't particularly buy it, but he's a student: whatcha gonna do?
I can't find the praise you recall though. It was pre-System so there weren't any comments.
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Oh yeah: this one from Joseph Young.
Nope. This one from Joseph Young. Firmly in the comments era. (Had to find it with Google!).
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Actually, leafing to through the comments reminded me once more of why I miss merc around here. He wrote smilpy: "It's not an article, it's an Amazonian butterfly."
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And Stephen was Nailing It back then too!
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Kyle, I agree, but I'm saying nobody is writing for the non-academic audiences.
Based on what? Academics reconstruct their academic work for a more popular audience all the time.
In my area of interest, Jamie Belich presented his own, and other people's research in a reasonably good, and popular TV series on the New Zealand Wars about a decade ago. There's some very good academically driven TV shows coming out of the UK on both history and science. They're even fronted by academics, and have still been successful.
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Nope. This one from Joseph Young. Firmly in the comments era. (Had to find it with Google!).
Ah, that one. It gets hard to remember. I certainly wasn't a believer in Blair, but it was useful to to present an energetic argument against what was the dominant belief in the Public Address community.
Some people liked it, some people hated it. But Joseph (who I've never met) was/is an educated young man. Surely it doesn't hurt anyone to read an argument that is in conflict with their own perspective?
This is what troubles me with Phelan's paper (and for that matter, Simmons' book): the absolute assumption of rectitude. The neoliberals feel the same way about their own ideas -- should we just believe them too?
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Surely it doesn't hurt anyone to read an argument that is in conflict with their own perspective?
An honest argument, no. The kind of deeply dishonest and puerile invective ("stop with the Iraq war aready! It's so boooring!") that we have come to expect from our esteemed editorialists and columnists? Not so much.
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I know they're not using "theory" the same way as Phelan does but did you notice the contrast between Ruth Thomas and the quoted Trotter piece about the current emphasis in journo training.
Trotter says:
The “professionalisation” of journalism, with its university degree courses and formal examinations, has come at the expense of what was formerly a “learn as you do” training regime run by the media itself. It may have been rough and ready, but this “on the job” education with its practical rather than theoretical emphasis, produced highly experienced journalists with a shrewd understanding of what motivated the prime news drivers in their communities. The state’s takeover of journalism training, while relieving the news media of its in-house training costs, has tended to favour theory over practice.
Thomas says:
The research found that journalism education in New Zealand, controlled by the New Zealand Journalists Training Organisation still resembles that of 20 years ago despite increasing numbers of students learning as part of degree programmes. Students are trained for the media through a method described as “learning by doing”.
...What I realised was that journalism educators see themselves as journalists
and they were teaching the students in the same way as they had learnt themselves.
Journalists know intrinsically what makes a good story. There’s a tendency to assume an understanding of newsworthiness just happens. They do not believe in discussing formal codes of newsworthiness that can be identified as news values.I note that one of the two actually reasearched what was currently going on before writing.
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An honest argument, no. The kind of deeply dishonest and puerile invective ("stop with the Iraq war aready! It's so boooring!") that we have come to expect from our esteemed editorialists and columnists? Not so much.
Curiously enough, the Herald has always been anti-Iraq war.
I remember when in 2003, Roy Greenslade wrote a fulminating piece for The Guardian alleging that Murdoch was instructing his papers to fall into a pro-war line. I was on Mediawatch at the time, and this was the script based on my examination of his claims:
In Monday's edition of The Guardian, columnist Roy Greenslade alleged that Rupert Murdoch had instructed the editors of his 175 newspapers around the world - from the Times, to the Australian and the New York Post - that their editorial stance should support war in Iraq.
After conducting what he said was an "exhaustive survey" of Murdoch's highest-selling and most influential papers, Greenslade said it was clear to him that all were "singing from the same hymn sheet". Some were softer than others, he said, but: "Their master's voice has never been questioned."
The malign proprietorial influence extended even to these shores, where, he said, "Murdoch's papers are eager to push readers and politicians towards belligerence." He quoted an editorial in Wellington's Dominion Post, which argued against what it described as the "charade" of "appeasement".
So does the evidence here support Greenslade's theory? No. We conducted our own, somewhat exhaustive, survey of editorials in New Zealand newspapers published by INL, in which Murdoch's News Limited has a 49 per cent stake. We concluded that editors were taking their own counsel, rather than that of Mr Murdoch.
By far the most hawkish of the INL papers has been The Press in Christchurch, which this week said the United Nations faced irrelevance if it did not opt for military action. The Dominion Post has been more circumspect and the Waikato Times and Sunday Star Times have been doubters.
The reality didn't fit the picture Greenslade drew.
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Also, as Du Fresne noted on his blog, Trotter is not actually a journalist. So if he hasn't spent all these years sitting in newsrooms, how has made his observations about how journalists work?
I thought Thomas's paper was very good. I think it showed that those who teach journalism are not yet actually teaching it. Instead, they're teaching the basic practical skills required to do it. They're hoping that the rest of it -- such harder to pin down qualities as news judgement -- are either something you're born with or something that seeps in by being exposed to it in a newsroom. In a way, there's something about the latter, as news values vary from place to place, or even editor to editor, but it means that the assumptions that underpin most news values aren't challenged either.
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And Stephen was Nailing It back then too!
That sounds allllll kinds of dodgy.
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That sounds allllll kinds of dodgy.
It was never meant not to.
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They're hoping that the rest of it -- such harder to pin down qualities as news judgement -- are either something you're born with or something that seeps in by being exposed to it in a newsroom.
I agree with Russell that there are increasing limitations to learning on the job:
Given the movement to outsource subbing by the big print publishers, that would be a problem.
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Academics reconstruct their academic work for a more popular audience all the time.
Belich is a good example, yes. Maybe I wasn't paying attention when the big tv shows about postmodernism and other cultural theories were screened. I guess Allain De Botton counts?
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Sacha, agreed on the outsourcing issue. When I first joined the Listener, there was a chief sub and a deputy editor -- Tom McWilliams and Geoff Chapple -- who helped steer me and other new writers. Tom, especially, was legendary for his patient tutoring. But there were twice as many on staff then producing a magazine that's the same size as today, and most of the subs have gone.
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Maybe I wasn't paying attention when the big tv shows about postmodernism and other cultural theories were screened.
Well there's plenty of TV shows about postmodern art and architecture and literature.
If you mean cultural theories in relation to Foucault, we should probably say post-structuralism. And it would be difficult to do a TV show about post-structuralism. You could do a TV show which analysed something from a post-structuralist perspective. I don't watch much 'arty shit', so I can't think of any off the top of my head.
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Sacha, agreed on the outsourcing issue. When I first joined the Listener, there was a chief sub and a deputy editor -- Tom McWilliams and Geoff Chapple -- who helped steer me and other new writers. Tom, especially, was legendary for his patient tutoring.
Tom: best sub ever. And sadly, not treated well at the end of his career.
Listener subs in general could be relied on to handle copy intelligently when I was writing for the magazine -- although it was always flattering to see a column go through without a mark on it.
But there were twice as many on staff then producing a magazine that's the same size as today, and most of the subs have gone.
There's been some better news on that front very recently ...
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If you mean cultural theories in relation to Foucault, we should probably say post-structuralism.
Except Foucault wasn't a post-structuralist. He was more a member of the old French history of science school, a la Gaston Bachelard. And the other interesting thing is that Foucault and Theory in general are, I think, becoming increasingly unfashionable in academia. It's been quite a noticeable trend since about 2000. Those of us who had Theory shoved down our throats as grad students in the '90s tend to be quite hostile to it, or at least ambivalent. The real Theory die-hards in academic departments are often baby boomers.
So Phelan's article is actually, I think, a bit of an outlier, even in the humanities. Most humanities scholarship, outside of media and cultural studies anyway, tends not to be that intensely invested in Theory. The Phelan piece -- incisive though it was, in parts -- seems a little mummified, like something preserved in amber since about 1986. It doesn't accurately reflect what's going on in most local academic departments, outside of a particular branch of cultural studies.
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This one from Joseph Young. Firmly in the comments era.
My very first PAS comment is in that thread.
As you were.
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I would be most interested in people linking to their first ever posting here.
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Except Foucault wasn't a post-structuralist.
Well I can't claim to be a Foucault expert at all. He's certainly been called that, but I note that wikipedia says he rejected both that label and postmodernist (which makes we wonder if he just didn't want to be labeled at all).
But OK. My point that there's umpteen TV shows on various postmodern topics on TV, post-structuralism would be more difficult to cover.
Though if we're talking about post-modernism in the media then there is a bit of analysis on TV about that. The Daily Show does it fairly often.
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Though if we're talking about post-modernism in the media then there is a bit of analysis on TV about that. The Daily Show does it fairly often.
That's hilarious. You're not deliberately trying to get Giovanni's blood pressure up are you?
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"Though if we're talking about post-modernism in the media then there is a bit of analysis on TV about that. The Daily Show does it fairly often."
That's hilarious. You're not deliberately trying to get Giovanni's blood pressure up are you?
See:
Jon Stewart: the prototype postmodern news anchor
From The PoMo Blog, no less.
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