Lecture One

One of the first things the students in that dank basement lecture theatre in the Forgan Smith building in late February was that the philosophy of the course is "you are the journalist." It had already gotten off to a pleasing start for me, a Bachelor of Journalism student who was at university for the second time (after my 9 month stint at Griffith was terminated early, thanks to an unreasonable employer...).

The lecturer for the course is Dr Bruce Redman, a journalism veteran of 30 years, who is actually a pleasure to listen to. Some lecturers dribble on a bit, but at least his anecdotes were infrequent in appearance, and entertaining when they did appear. He recommended Tina Fey's Bossypants as a good read; I still have to get around to downloading that on iBooks...

The lecture covered the basics of the course, and also why it's beneficial, even if you don't intend to become a journalist (I want to become one, but I'm sure there were others in there for their own reasons). The part I found most interesting was the summary of challenges faced by modern journalism, such as changes in technology, public perception of journalists and PR people (we have News of the World to thank for contributing to the negative image of the profession), user generated content and citizen journalism, as well as the greatest blight of all (in my opinion), news as entertainment.

News is not meant to be entertaining, it's meant to inform and educate. If you want entertainment, read a novel. Or more appropriately, watch Today Tonight, that's fiction enough and it's in a digestible 30-minute chunk.

The lecture also covered our assessments, one of which was to blog the lectures. I've been a bit lazy and not written any until now (being week 5 of the semester), but I have taken thorough notes of each lecture, so I think I'll just post them up now.

Look out for the rest of the thrilling adventures of my lecture experience and other related ramblings. Yay.