Dumb News, Smart Students

If you were in Melbourne in the middle of last month and watching National Nine News, you could have been forgiven for thinking you’d been transported to Middle Earth.

Increasingly shallow, banal and celebrity driven, the commercial network which, for decades, prided itself on its news service, plumbed new depths of irrelevance, when a story about missing bridesmaids gowns ran third in their prime-time Melbourne bulletin.

Slugged "Dressing Down", the story was billed as a "heartbreaking" expose on the destruction of 'bridal bliss'. In truth, it was a pathetic excuse for a news story and a sad indictment on society and the Nine News brand: tearful family members (cast as news sources) re-telling their "traumatic" tale of discovering the bridesmaids' dresses weren't ready in time for an average suburban wedding. Shock! Horror! The “broidsmaids” were “forced” to don tracky-daks and thongs and witness the wedding from the sidelines because they were too embarrassed to join the bride at the alter. I've rarely witnessed such "tragic" television.

This is what happens when news is dumbed down and soft news, driven by lifestyle imperatives, sets the agenda. This diminution in quality, and the elevation of flim flam, undermines the professionalism of journalism. It's the stuff of tabloid TV current affairs infiltrating news agendas. And there are echoes here of the debate over online print content being influenced by "clickworthiness" (an issue for another post).

This story highlights the importance of embedding hard news research, gathering and writing - theory and practice - in tertiary journalism courses as a means of combating the trend towards dumbing down...especially as Australian commercial TV news now struggles at times to achieve an IQ in double digits.

This doesn't mean we teach only bland, traditional story-telling techniques - but that we teach students how to tell original, newsworthy stories in relevant, engaging ways. They need to graduate prepared to combat shallow, entertainment-driven news values and fulfil their democratic role of keeping governments and businesses accountable through the essential task of hard news reporting.

At the University of Canberra, where I lecture in broadcast journalism (radio and TV) at second and third year level, we prioritise the teaching of the concept of hard news – news that reflects serious issues affecting society; that encourages investigation and revelation; that challenges authority.

Some journalism lecturers argue that this approach fails to meet students "where they’re at" and one, at Rhodes University in South Africa, has even gone so far as to suggest hard news be abandoned in their introductory journalism course and replaced with soft/creative forms like personality profiles, news features and colour stories focused exclusively on university life. With a post titled “Let's chuck out hard news!” on the Rhodes Journalism School New Media Lab blog, Rod Anmer has sparked an interesting debate about the issue of introductory journalism education.

His argument is that the course needs an increased focused on theory at the expense of practice: “maybe there is one way to incorporate a bit of history and methodology and sociology and media studies into the Introduction to News course. Simply chuck out hard news! Replace it with personal narrative, profile writing, news features and personal reflections on media texts.”

The Head of the School, Guy Berger, has forcefully disagreed with this approach: “Understanding hard news - and following it (something Rod is terribly silent about) - is the key to students beginning to understand that journalism is not about "I specialist" work, but ways of transcending identity to narrate the wider world to various publics. Informed consumption is surely key to critical production. Way too many students are blinkered about the wider world - unexposed to hard news, indeed even have their prejudices against the intrusions of the wider world being reinforced by us sometimes. Rod seems to want to run with student self-interest - but where to? What price popularity?” Berger advocates a ‘tough love’ approach “You want to be a journalist: there’s a side to the world you need to learn to play in – and you have to know the rules if you want to tweak or twist them. In a word: “Learn to engage with it from early on, or decide rather to go into Public Relations.”

My take goes like this: Much as I agree that alternative/creative journalistic forms (e.g features; biography; autobiograpahy; blogging; opinion; documentary; commentary; activist journalism and so on) should be acknowledged as legitimate journalistic forms, explored, and incorporated into teaching within journalism courses where possible, I really couldn't come at the idea of starting with such forms in a first year introductory journalism unit. I hate to resort to cliche, but it's risky to introduce students to walking before crawling...I think hard news is where we must start - it allows for appropriate introductory education in research/investigation and interview techniques which form the basic infrastructure of journalism.

By all means, get students blogging about the news as part of their critical reflection - perhaps they could even blog about the processes of investigating and reporting their first hard-news assignment. But make the hard-news gathering process the focus of the first-taught skills set. We have enough ill-informed opinion and bad prose masquerading as journalism... What we need most is well-informed journalism graduates who understand how to uncover facts and piece them together in a digestible and engaging way. Writing hard news is hard...hence the need to begin with it, and thread it through the course entire, to ensure strong underpinnings in graduates' practice.

But starting with what interests students does work as a means of engaging them in hard-news pursuit. For example, I get students to collectively discuss what news grabs their attention and teach them how to think deeper about the substantive news/issues connected to the flim flam (in a tutorial that resembled an editorial meeting) before embarking on a news assignment built on the principles of enterprising reporting.

For example, Lindsay Lohan is done for DUI (again!). No, her story isn't newsworthy outside of the tabloids or the entertainment sections but there's meat there to chew on...Is there any evidence that such behaviour is contributing to the phenomenon of teenage binge-drinking? Is there a story around young women's identity or the poison of celebrity? The local high school may be running an anti-binge drinking campaign targeting young women and engaging positive role models to counter the effect of Lindsay, Paris et al, for example. So, Lindsay may be the hook to the harder news story, but she ain't the main game! This process teaches students to think critically about the news, but also to think outside the box in a way that inspires the pursuit of original, enterprising stories which reflect their interests - at the gateway to hard news. In my experience, this is the best way to cultivate that elusive journalistic attribute - news-sense - in students. And hard-news writing is rarely achievable in the absence of a good nose for news.

Of course, hard news can emerge from themes often perceived by old, male news editors as soft, ‘chicks' news’ (e.g. social affairs and arts) but it has to have a hard edge. If a student tells me they want to be a fashion journalist, I say - "maybe you should go to fashion school, but I can teach you how to report the industry. See that Oz designer jacket you're wearing - it was probably made by impoverished Asian workers - bring me a story about the rag trade that makes people think and has the potential to make an impact on policy and practice". Of course, I'd also entertain a story about a local designer making it "big" or lamenting the difficult path to success in a tough business.

My third year TV students filed their first assessable news packages last week, demonstrating their capacity to report hard news in an engaging way and providing evidence that the UC model of embedding hard news theory and practice throughout the three year course is a success.

They were instructed to deliver 1.5 minute "hard" TV news stories. This was the first time in their university careers they'd been asked to converge their hard news research, writing and interviewing training with newly developed TV-package production skills. Several started with weak/soft options but these ideas were, through tutorial editorial meetings, translated into newsworthy stories. Three examples include a yarn about failed Canberra waste strategies, a story on new threats to endangered species posed by kangaroo over-grazing at a defence site, and a report on prescription drug overdoses. All were original stories and two of those have been picked up by other media in the past week.

Their stories are webcast on the University of Canberra student journalism portal: www.nowuc.com.au with their video reports linked via youtube.
You can see the aforementioned stories here, here, and here

The stories aren't perfect: there are flaws in construction; story-telling; scripting and production values of the sort you'd expect for their first engagement with traditional TV news story formats. But, they are, I think, an example of the capacity of students operating under heavy pop-culture influences, in the age of celebrity (note the Heath Ledger references as a hook in the overdose piece), to deliver engaging hard news stories under pressure. There are many similar high quality examples which we'll progressively upload to NOWUC in the coming weeks. And, later in the semester, we'll be producing a series of bulletin vodcasts drawing on assessable pieces like these. You can view more Youtube video stories here.

Further evidence of the success of the UC journalism approach is the response of employers to our students and graduates. Apart from having UC journalism alumni in senior journalism positions internationally, our third year students engage with industry through work experience and internships at the ABC. The ABC takes approximately 10 UC interns each year through an industry-modelled selection process developed collaboratively and commenced in 2004. Interns' work is regularly broadcast during their stints in the ABC’s tri-media (radio, TV and online) Canberra newsroom - it's an exciting opportunity for students and the chance to embed their education in reality. When I visited the ABC a week ago, the Chief of Staff and a senior producer made the following comments of UC interns when I asked for feedback about their performance: "not a dud among them!"; "they can all write"; "keep doing what you're doing – it’s obviously working"; "they have that good old fashioned ability to dig up stories and bring fresh perspectives to this newsroom”. That’s good news to my ears!

NOTE: I'll be joining the Rhodes Journalism team in June/July to work on an exciting convergent journalism production revolving around the South African National Arts Festival. Naturally, I intend to blog about the journey, so stay tuned!