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Diversity of Journalisms. Proceedings of ECREA/CICOM Conference, Pamplona, 4-5 July 2011
Paper panel 13 – Broadcast media facing diversity
Tuesday, July 5th 8.30 - 10.00 (Room 1)
Creating radio waves: lessons from a content analysis of diversity in student
journalism
Bahfen, Nasya; Wake, Alexandra
RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia
Journalism educators face challenges when teaching their students how to
adequately cover the diversity of their communities, stemming from either resistance
at institutional levels or a lack of structured approaches and guidelines (Nicholson
2003). The conclusion many educators reach is that future journalists emerge from
university ill-equipped to deal with reporting stories that reflect the diversity of their
communities (Curtis, 2010; Hernandez, 1995). Journalism students at a university in
Melbourne completed two newsroom production sessions for one of the city’s major
community radio stations, as part of their assessment in a semester-long subject.
Each session involved the preparation and presentation of a five-minute news
bulletin. The students made specific choices about their bulletins in the stories they
chose to cover on a particular day, the interviewees they contacted to assist them in
telling the story, the angle of each story, the way interviews were edited, and the
order of the bulletin. This paper looks at the students’ choices of story and
interviewee/talent, over a six week broadcast period in 2010. It reflects on the nature
of the news organization for which the bulletins were produced, and the level of
diversity or homogeneity found in the stories and the talent used to tell them. It also
discusses what lessons may be contained for journalism educators, in the breakdown
of stories chosen by students and the composition of interviewees/talent contacted by
the students.
Diversity and deliberativeness in TV news
van der Wurff, Richard; Verhoeven, Pieter
The Amsterdam School of Communications Research ASCoR, Amsterdam, The
Netherlands
"In science there are always many sides... the trouble with journalism is you only have
space for two sides." Scholars regularly appear on TV as expert sources in general
news items where they comment on policy and social issues. This paper investigates
what, if anything, their appearance adds to television news. Do scholars contribute
substantiated arguments, independent reflexivity, diverse view points, and balanced
judgements to public affairs debates? Or is their appearance embedded in a media
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