(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
copyright. These were the description of the understanding of contributors to the code
of journalism ethics.
In terms of knowledge and skills of journalism, these contributors obtained their skills
by learning on their own as autodidact or they learned video shooting and editing to
their friends. The contributors did not study video production through the formal
education. Similarly, they did the same way for writing, except for the contributors who
were print journalist previously. For contributors who previously were stringer studying
journalism and video production with helping to supply information and pictures to
their friends or families who were contributors. It was happened when they were
assigned as the contributors for the first time. After working several moths, some of
them took the training, but some others did not do it because the station did not provide
the training or they did not assigned to take the training. If a television station provided
training for the contributors, it was not intended for all contributors in Indonesia.
Contributors who earn the privilege to attend the training were the best contributor.
Moreover, the training that provided by station was a basic training.
The lack of knowledge and skill of the contributors in producing the TV news could be
seen also from other cases outside of this research. The occurrence of contributor who
was killed while covering clashes between residents, it showed that the contributor did
not understand the technique of covering the conflict areas. Because he did not know
how to cover the conflict, the contributor did the video shooting freely in the midst of a
mass brawl. As a result he was killed by one of the warring parties. This was a clear
evidence of the lack of journalism knowledge and skills.
In summary, the contributors had only limited ability, knowledge, and skills of TV
journalism. Consequently, they did not know and did not apply the elements of
journalism completely as recommended by Kovach and Rosenstiel (2007).
The final criterion from Broddason is the relationship between client and public. In this
criterion, the contributors were highly aware that their obligations were to inform and
to educate people. Their awareness was demonstrated by making news about local
government, disasters, accidents, education, health, poverty, etc. On the contrary, they
also produced the trivial news, so that why the station rejected their news, because the
news did not have trustworthiness. They reported the trivial thing when they did not
find hot issues or spectacular events. Finally, they did also journalistic work for
fulfillment of personal needs namely salary and it was only obtained by sending the
news.
It was very difficult to say that the contributors are professional journalist. The news
contributors with the right skills remain very difficult. The skilled contributors remain
quite rare, because they had no professional TV training and completed journalism
knowledge. Consequently, they did journalistic work without a professional standard of
journalism, whereas the contributors did their jobs for the professional media. By
examining the case through “the norms and performance standards” from Mogensen
and four criteria from Broddason, it was found that the news contributors in Indonesia
still need to learn and to comprehend deeply about the professional standard of
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