Media Studies and Journalism
Sue Turnbull
Let me take you through the different ways we’ve got of studying here. You can come into Media Studies by at least three, possibly four, different routes. The first way is the Bachelor of Media Studies. The second is the Bachelor of Journalism. Now those are degree courses. They’re named degree courses. You come out of the other end Bachelor of Journalism, Bachelor of Media Studies.
You could also do a BA. Just a simple BA and major in Media Studies. And you can do a double major with Cinema Studies, with English, with Theatre and Drama, with Politics, etc. And we do have a double degree called the Bachelor of Laws, Bachelor of Media Studies and that’s five years long. You’re basically doing two degrees in five years as opposed to two degrees in six years.
The Bachelor of Laws is going to be the hardest to get in. It’s going to be a big ENTER score, up there in the 90’s. The Bachelor of Journalism, Bachelor of Media Studies – 80, 85. Media Studies major, probably 65, 70 getting into Humanities. And if you don’t know what you really want to do, probably the Bachelor of Arts with a major in Media Studies is the best idea because you come in and you can do four different subjects in first year. You could do Media Studies, English, Politics, History. At the end of your first year you go, “I can’t stand Media Studies. I think I’ll do English. I really loved English.” OK? And then you can change and you can focus on that.
If you come into the Bachelor of Media Studies and Bachelor of Journalism, you are going to do four subjects in first year in the area of Media Studies. And if you continue there’s going to be fewer options for doing other stuff. Because you’re going to be doing four subjects at second year, four subjects at third year, which only leaves you a little bit of space to continue another subject.
Bachelor of Media Studies is the one where you can choose after first year. You do the same subject as the Bachelor of Journalism. You do a theory subject called “Constructing Communication”. Anybody doing Year 12 Media? OK. Constructing Communication is a lot like Year 12 Media. It does kind of theory of reading images.
Along side that you’ll do a subject called “Making the News”. Anybody been down to the TV studio? OK, you’ve been there, had a look. Good. We’ve got a beautifully equipped television studio. In Making the News, you learn the theory of how the news is produced, the idea of agenda setting. Who gets to decide what goes to air. That whole idea of if ‘it bleeds, it leads’. And the whole way in which images have become so important to news broadcasting. And you then are put into a team and you have to work on producing your own live-to-air news broadcast. And it is recorded and you are marked as a team on the quality of your production.
You then in first year will do a subject called, “Writing for the Media” which involves writing for all sorts of media. And another subject called “Audiences and Communication” where we’re focusing on radio. And my students are about 250 students in that subject at the moment. And they’re working in pairs producing a radio current affairs broadcast of four minutes. They spend four weeks learning how to use the equipment, how to use the editing software. We use a program called Entice, which you could actually download free from the web. And they get all their audio tracks. They’ve got to go organize interviews. They’ve got to have sound and they have multiple layers. And they sit there and they have access to the editing studios. And they have to produce this four-minute broadcast and they’re due in tomorrow, the first batch of those.
Then at the end of first year you choose, “Do I want to do television video, radio audio or journalism?” The Bachelor of Media Studies, you keep your options open. At the same time as you are developing writing and production skills and you’re studying the social, economic and political aspects of the media.
Now, the theory part of Media is terribly important. Most of you when you leave will find that you are going into jobs that have not been invented yet. Right? The media are changing so quickly that we can teach you the technology and the editing programs that are available now, in four years time it would have all changed.
What won’t have changed, what will stay exactly the same is the need for you to be able to find information, to organize information. To make it coherent and for you to translate that into a form that communicates with an audience. So that the traditional academic skills of research, thinking, writing but even more so within Media Studies, working collaboratively with groups of people because so many media jobs involve actually working as a team. Those are the important things and we stress those.
So, as I said, Bachelor of Arts with a Media major is the one that keeps your options open. Cinema Studies, Politics, Sociology, Legal Studies, you can combine. If you want to be a teacher of Media Studies, this is not a bad idea because you will need another major. You will need another subject that you are able to teach if you want to go into teaching. Unfortunately, Media Studies and Cinema Studies, if you do those two, they count for the same when you go into teaching. Right?
Bachelor of Journalism, now that’s the one where you are only going to focus on journalism skills – writing and editing, both print and online journalism. I’ve been asked by a number of people today. Next year we’re introducing one subject, that’s Sports Journalism. We’re trying to then introduce some subjects more in the PR line.
Now, when we say PR – Public Relations – this means for example, you might not be working in a media organization at all. I have a very dear friend who is the media officer for the city of Port Philip. She works alongside the mayor. She writes all his speeches for the media. She manages all the press. She contacts them. She gets them together and she has to try and collect everything that is said and organize when they intervene.
All sorts of jobs around the media are not necessarily within media organizations. Politicians need media managers. Companies need media managers. Toyota needs somebody to write about their cars to sell them to people. All sorts of ways in which you can use a Media Studies degree not necessarily working at the ABC, The Age, if there are any jobs left at Fairfax because they want to sack 500 journalists. Doesn’t mean that there won’t be any jobs, it just means they don’t want to pay those full time salaries. Anyway, there are all sorts of jobs that you can find in media.
Now, we do have postgraduate degrees for those of you who are thinking about going on or even we’ve got some parents sitting here who are thinking of going back to study. Graduate certificate, graduate diploma in Media or Journalism. Who knows? You could end up in class next to your own child. Wouldn’t they love that?
We’ve also got a Master of Global Communications coming in. That will be a one-year masters degree that will allow you to do a variety of subjects including practical subjects at a masters level. We’re going to introduce a Master of Global Communications with Honours, which means that you can go on to a Ph.D. afterwards and the Doctor of Philosophy which notionally takes three years. And these days they do try to get people through in three years. It took me seven but I do not recommend getting married and having a baby in the middle of doing a Ph.D. But that’s what happens to everybody except of course if they’re male or not interested in having a baby. I think I’ll stop there.
Key aspects of our program: it combines practice and theory. It’s not one or the other, it’s both. That is the strength of our program. Other universities, RMIT Journalism is much more journalism production oriented. Swinburne, a little bit more like RMIT. We’re the one that does try to keep that theory practice balanced.
We try to teach in small groups. If you’re doing a production subject, if you’re doing video, radio or journalism, you are in a class of 25. You have to be in a class of 25 because we’ve got equipment and editing suites and only enough seats in the room to seat 25 for those sorts of classes. In our other tutorials, it might be up to 30 but sometimes you’re in a class that has less than that.
Student satisfaction is high. We don’t get complaints and most of our students do get jobs and quite a lot of them get extremely good jobs. I’ll say a little bit more about that in just a second. Honours Year, you can do a fourth year. If you come out with a B average, especially at third year, you can go on and do a fourth year, which involves maybe doing a thesis. Something like a creative thesis. And by that we mean you can make a documentary. You can make a short film. You can do a long piece of journalism. You can make a radio broadcast and that will count as a thesis. You can then take that to your employer, take that to the VCA, which won’t let you in unless you’ve got a great portfolio and say, “Look, this is what I’ve got.” Right? “I’m that good.”
We have an internship program at third year. It means that you can get a placement in industry and it counts as a subject towards your degree. Where did we have them, Crikey.com? We had one of our students, Luke Fennessey, went to work for The Australian for two weeks – three weeks actually. You have to do 120 hours. And he was there for three weeks working with The Australian and the story of the little girl who was abandoned at Southern Cross Station happened. And they sent Luke down there. And Luke wrote the story and broke the news of Pumpkin, the little girl who’d been abandoned. And Luke then went on and has worked with them again and is now working for Crikey Business Section. So he just went straight from us, straight into a job that kind of came out of his internship. So, we do have those success student stories.
So the internship program can lead to employment. Quite often employers ring us and say, “We want them now. Can they start tomorrow?” And we say, “They’ve got to finish their degree!” And then we have to find a way to kind of making that happen.
We have international exchange programs. I’ve just signed off on two students who are going to America for a year to the Columbia School of Journalism in Missouri. It is the most famous journalism school in America. It’s the biggest. It’s been in operation for 100 years. They’re having their 100th Centenary. Imagine, a school of journalism which started in 1908.
And we’re developing closer and closer relationships so that what we actually want to do is take across a group of students in Journalism. They have their own newspaper. They run the town radio station. They kind of are massively involved in the community. And we’re going to be using their skills to do the same here and to send our students there as well as staff. So that’s all happening.
We also have exchange programs with the University of Southern California, all the way through from San Francisco down to San Diego. So if, you know, you’re real ambition is to get over onto the west coast and hang out, that’s where you want to go. And we also have exchange with Europe including Edinburgh. Queen Mary University College has had a long history of exchanging students and staff with us.
So once you’re here, the greatest thing you can do is do an exchange. And that’s what I did when I went to university. I actually went to Canada for a year and did my masters degree at University of Toronto. And it was the most exciting thing that I ever did. Apart from spending four months in snow, which is hard to imagine, and meeting the Mounties and all that kind of stuff. It was a real challenge to go somewhere else to a graduate school and to study and to learn that culture.
Our students are a mixture of school leavers and mature age students. We love having mature age students because mature age students usually know what they want to do. They’re usually very focused which is not to say that school leavers aren’t but quite often, you know, a school leaver can come in and maybe decide that the program is not for them. And that’s all right too. You can drop out. You can defer. You can go away until you’re ready to come back again.
Our international students come from all over of the world. I’ve got master students at the moment from India, Malaysia and from Norway. In fact, one of our international Norwegian students who’s been with us since – he was a journalist in Norway. Came in as a mature age student, did his undergraduate degree. He’s now doing a masters which he’s going to upgrade to a Ph.D. and he’s tutoring in first year for us. So our international students work extremely well within the department and bring a lot to the experience.
We’ve got journalism labs. We’ve got radio studios and editing suites. We’ve got fully equipped television studio and editing. You can borrow cameras. You can borrow recording equipment. And then, when you are a student, you get on your student card access to the editing suites when you’re working in a production subject.
I suspect that I will have a number of students in the radio studio editing suite over tonight because their first assignment is due in at 5:00 tomorrow. And the whole idea of coming in and you can work through the night is just something that you have to go through as a student really. It’s just one of those things. Sleeping under the desk and eating egg sandwiches. It’s all part of it.
OK, if you need any more information, this is how to get hold of us. I’m Sue Turnbull and I’m head of Media Studies and Journalism at the moment. And you can get hold of me or Kylie who is our administrator and we’ll do our best to answer any questions that you’ve got. Meanwhile, have you got any questions now? Is there anything that you want to raise? Yes?
Audience 1:
What are the main job prospects?
Sue Turnbull:
What are the main job prospects? Well, I think I’ve kind of suggested that you might get into a major media organization. You know, you might get into the ABC, you might get into SBS but we’ve got 120 students and maybe five or 10 will get into those big organizations. The rest of you – and they’ll be the best or the luckiest. You know, who knows? It’s a question of timing and being in the right place, and skills.
But if you’re a student from a different language, we’ve got a Turkish student who got head hunted from us for The Age because they wanted a student reporter who was a Muslim to report on Muslim matters. So you know, all sorts of things can happen in terms of the companies coming to us and saying, “We want a really good graduate in that area.”
Audience 2:
How about presenting on TV?
Sue Turnbull:
On TV presenting, OK. Well, I hate to say this but you’ve got to be incredibly good looking if you’re female and you got to be middle aged and fat if you’re a man.
Am I wrong? Well, actually, Matt Ferguson is not bad but for the most part, when you’re a presenter, all you’ve got to be able to do is read. Right? You don’t need to be a terrific journalist. You’re just a face. Right?
So if that’s what you want to do then best thing you can do is go to charm school and beauty school and do as much as you can to arrange your face in a pleasing way. And elocution lessons and deportment lessons, right? I’m not sneering at that. I mean you can be a great journalist but I have many friends, women friends, who work in the media and the tyranny of the look and how you look. I mean you just have to look at some of the female news presenters to realize how airbrushed they are. And how the minute they begin to age and get a bit older, everybody starts to concentrate, “My god! Isn’t she looking old?” Right? So, I mean. That’s the story.
Radio, great face for radio, anybody can do radio. All you need is a voice and the ability to read. But if you want to be a journalist, you’re going to be the one that writes the words not the one – the one that presents them – I was going to say, you know, anybody can do that with those qualifications. But the real interesting part is to be the person who puts the stories together. To be the storyteller, to be the controller, to be the person that manages the sound.
Audience 3:
Will we be travelling to go and get the stories?
Sue Turnbull:
Yes! If you want to be a correspondent, if you want to go out into the field, they’re the most glamorous jobs that you can possibly get but they’re also incredibly demanding. I mean I know Eric Campbell who works for foreign correspondent. And he’s married and got a young child and he is on a plane eight months of the year, right? And it’s a horrible job a lot of the time. But anyway, I mean it’s also exciting and all the rest of it. OK, I think that’s enough on job prospects. Go on.
Audience 4:
If you’re doing a BA and want to major in Media Studies, I believe it's chosen by an interviewer. Am I wrong?
Sue Turnbull:
No. It’s all done by ENTER.
Audience 4:
Oh, OK.
Sue Turnbull:
Getting into Media Studies simply depends on your ENTER score. If you’re a mature age student, VTAC still organizes it. We don’t see anything.
Audience 4:
I have a son, he’s deferred this year for BA and he wants to come back next year and get into Media Studies.
Sue Turnbull:
Right.
Audience 4:
His ENTER was 68.
Sue Turnbull:
Well, I don’t know if they re-look at the ENTER score, but I think if he deferred he would be accepted again unless – do you know if the ENTER score differs vividly? I don’t think it matters.
Audience 4:
He gets in automatically into Media Studies?
Sue Turnbull:
He’d be accepted automatically, but not into the Bachelor of Media Studies or Bachelor of Journalism.
Audience 4:
Oh, no. I’m not talking about that...
Sue Turnbull:
Just the major. Yeah, yeah. He’d be fine. Yep?
Audience 5:
Can you do electives in journalism, the journalism stuff or if you're into journalism science or something?
Sue Turnbull:
No, sorry. You can’t do electives. You have to be enrolled in the Bachelor of Media Studies or Bachelor of Journalism. There are some subjects you can do as electives, but not the journalism subjects. Simply because there’s not enough room, because we’ve got 120 students and they fill up all those places in the production labs. So we can’t take extras in.
Audience 5:
So is there any cross with any – so there are a few subjects that you can do. You just can’t do…
Sue Turnbull:
Yeah. There are some subjects that are not quoted which means there’s no restriction on the levels, but they tend to be more theory subjects.
Audience 5:
Oh, OK.
Sue Turnbull:
Yep. OK, any more questions? Yep?
Audience 6:
How many journalism students get the opportunity or are accepted to an international exchange?
Sue Turnbull:
It depends on your marks, right. We would not send a student who had failed a subject in the semester prior or who was struggling because it wouldn’t be fair on them. Because it demands quite a bit of adaptability and personal strength to be able to cope with the changes that are involved. So you’d have to be B student. A B average, you know, and we’d have to feel really positive that you could cope. Yep? There’s one in front and one behind so we’ll go behind if you hold on one sec. Yep?
Audience 7:
So, just to clarify, can you do a BA degree majoring in Journalism?
Sue Turnbull:
No. You can major in Media Studies.
Audience 7:
OK, but not journalism.
Sue Turnbull:
No. OK? The journalism subjects are largely reserved for the Bachelor of Media Studies, Bachelor of Journalism people. OK? And you’re question was?
Audience 8:
Can you combine a Bachelor of Media Studies with a degree in Languages?
Sue Turnbull:
That’s hard because the only space that you’ve got is four units at first year, which would be 60 credit points. And then, 20 at second year and 20 at third year. And I don’t think that would give you a double degree. You could do a language but it wouldn’t give you a degree in a language if you see what I mean. Yep?
Audience 9:
Can you talk a little bit about the other information units that you’re talking about?
Sue Turnbull:
Yeah, we haven’t got those up yet. They’re the ones that are coming in. At the moment, there is some PR writing in the first year subject, Writing for the Media. And the journalism lecturers are very cognizant of the PR aspect so all of them build a PR element into the current subjects, right. But at the moment we don’t have named subjects called PR. That’s coming. That’ll be here in at least two years, I’m pretty sure about that. Yep?
Audience 10:
Can you do a double degree in Media Studies and Journalism?
Sue Turnbull:
No. You’ll have to choose either one or the other because some of the subjects are the same. So you have to choose which name you want.
Audience 10:
So you can’t do Bachelor of Media Studies and Bachelor of Journalism?
Sue Turnbull:
No.
Audience 10:
OK. That’s good.
Sue Turnbull:
Either or. Yep?
Audience 11:
Can you transfer? So do a BA degree and then if you want to switch into a Bachelor of Journalism you can do that?
Sue Turnbull:
Absolutely. If you start off in first year – let’s just say for argument’s sake you don’t get 80, 85. You come out with a 67, 68. You go into the Media Studies major; at the end of the first year you are a star. Right? You have found the love of your life, which is Media Studies, and you’ve got B’s in all of your other subjects. And then we say, “Yes! Come to us. It’s all right.”
Sue Turnbull:
OK, is that about it? Oh, OK. Sorry.
Audience 12:
Can you study like a Humanity subject in a Journalism degree?
Sue Turnbull:
Yes, but only four units at first year, two at second and two at third.
Audience 12:
So you can’t major in something...?
Sue Turnbull:
No. We want all of you. OK, is that it? OK, cool! Oh, was there another one? There was, yes?
Audience 13:
Do you assist with the internship prospects?
Sue Turnbull:
Do we assist? We do assist but it is largely up to you. We can help you. Lawrie Zion who is head of Journalism, some of you might remember him from The Panel. He used to do the film reviews on The Panel and he also was at Triple J for a long time and started the Triple J Hot 100. I keep saying that if you know Lawrie Zion you are one degree of separation from almost everybody in the Media Studies industry. Lori’s connections in journalism are wide ranging. And usually he can help you find a place. John Benson actually runs the subject but between them, they have had students in almost every media organization you could think of. So they will help you.
If there is a hand, wave it harder because I think that’s about it. OK, well, if you do have anymore questions, I’ll hang on for a couple of minutes but we’re finishing up now. Thank you for coming and good luck.
