[csaa-forum] Media at Sydney: Seminar Series Semester 1, 2014

[Cesar Albarran Torres]

Media at Sydney: Seminar Series Semester 1, 2014

10th March: ‘Journalism and foreign policy: covering the Middle East’
Ms Carol Giacomo, New York Times, foreign affairs editorial writer

Reporting on the foreign affairs agenda of a major world power can have extraordinary personal and political challenges. Veteran New York Times and Reuters journalist Carol Giacomo joins Media at Sydney to talk about the demands of foreign policy journalism and her strategies for dealing with contentious debates, such as the backlash against the recent academic boycott of Israel.

Carol Giacomo is a foreign affairs editorial writer for The New York Times. She is a former diplomatic correspondent for Reuters in Washington, where she covered foreign policy for the international wire service for more than two decades. As a Reuters correspondent she traveled over one million miles to more than 100 countries with eight Secretaries of State and various other senior U.S. officials. She joined The New York Times editorial board in August 2007. She won the Georgetown University Weintal Prize for diplomatic reporting in 2009. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. In 1999-2000 she was a senior fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace, researching U.S. economic and foreign policy decision-making during the Asian financial crisis.

In the fall semester of 2013 Carol was the Ferris Professor in Journalism at Princeton University, teaching editorial writing on international issues. She has been a guest lecturer at the U.S. National War College and other academic institutions. Born and raised in Connecticut, she holds a B.A. in English Literature from Regis College in Weston, Massachusetts. She began her professional journalism career at the Lowell Sun and later worked for the Hartford Courant in the city hall, state capitol and Washington bureaus.

4:00– 5:00pm, in the S226 MECO seminar room, Level 2 John Woolley Building (A20)<http://db.auth.usyd.edu.au/directories/map/building.stm?ref=d08h15>   entry off Manning Road, near the 19th century machine sculpture.

11th March: ‘Rupert Murdoch: A Reassessment’ (book launch)
Emeritus Professor Rodney Tiffen

What is the truth about Rupert Murdoch and his audacious business practices? Tony Abbott thinks that Murdoch is one of the most influential Australians of all time and that we should support our ‘hometown hero’. Conrad Black once described his fellow media tycoon as, like Napoleon, ‘a great bad man’, and said it would be as wrong to doubt his greatness as his badness. American newspaper columnist Mike Royko was cheekier: no self-respecting fish, he said, would be seen dead wrapped in one of  Murdoch’s papers.


In his landmark book, Rodney Tiffen provides a fresh assessment of a remarkable and controversial media proprietor – his journalism, his  unparalleled expansion and his costly failures. It offers a new perspective on the development of Murdoch’s political ideas, his enthusiasm for campaigning, and the way he has transformed political support into policy favours in Canberra, London and Washington. Finally, it examines the phone-hacking and bribery scandals that have wracked Murdoch’s empire, and traces their roots to a corporate culture shaped by one man over six decades.

Rodney Tiffen is Emeritus Professor in Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney. A leading international scholar of media, his books include News and Power (1989); Scandals: Media, Politics and Corruption in Contemporary Australia (1999); Diplomatic Deceits: Government, Media and East Timor (2001), and numerous other publications on mass media and Australian politics. His most recent book, with Ross Gittins, is How Australia Compares (2nd ed. 2009). He worked with the Media Monitoring Project as an observer during the 1994 South African election, conducted three reviews of Radio Australia, and worked with the independent Finkelstein Inquiry into the media in 2011-12.

5:00– 6:30pm, in the S226 MECO seminar room, Level 2 John Woolley Building (A20)<http://db.auth.usyd.edu.au/directories/map/building.stm?ref=d08h15>   entry off Manning Road, near the 19th century machine sculpture.

28th March: ‘Challenging official propaganda? Public opinion leaders on Sina Weibo’
Dr Joyce Y.M. Nip

This study seeks to understand the implications of the Internet on freedom of information and opinion in China by studying the mechanism of formation of public opinion in a series of corruption cases exposed after the Chinese Communist Party's 18th Congress in 2012.

Focusing on Sina Weibo, the study examines the prominence of various users as public opinion leaders in these corruption cases. The research found that ordinary citizens made the largest category that initiated the cases, whereas news organizations and online media were the main actors that set the agenda of and disseminated information about corruption. Reading the messages found that news organizations and online media mainly published similar content to that of official agencies, suggesting that the commonly-held view that the party-state has little influence on Weibo needs revisiting.

Among the most eye-catching cases, cultural and news workers played a significant role in getting messages reposted and commented upon. These findings suggest that while Weibo provides channels for citizens to publish information and opinion, the news media and online outlets remain as the main vehicle of agenda setting and public dissemination. Reputable individuals are able to triumph as public opinion leaders in certain cases. The party-state, with the media under its control, is able to maintain its general domination of public opinion on the Sina Weibo platform.

Dr Joyce Y.M. Nip is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Media and Communications and the Department of Chinese Studies at The University of Sydney. She was a journalist before joining the academia, and is an editorial board member of Journalism Practice and Digital Journalism.

3:00– 4:30pm, in the S226 MECO seminar room, Level 2 John Woolley Building (A20)<http://db.auth.usyd.edu.au/directories/map/building.stm?ref=d08h15>   entry off Manning Road, near the 19th century machine sculpture.

11th April: ‘Slow journalism and the recovery of attention’
Dr Megan Le Masurier

In his existential mathematics of memory, the novelist Milan Kundera suggests that ‘the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting’ (1996).

Before we can forget however there has to be something to remember.

In terms of the world beyond our everyday lives, journalism is a key mediator of information, some of it puerile and forgettable, some of it critical to our political, cultural, social lives. It has been argued that the speed of much contemporary journalism, in its instantaneous communications via proliferating media platforms to an already information-saturated public, overwhelms our capacity to attend – to listen, select, concentrate, and finally to remember. Surfeit and speed allow information to enter short term but not long-term memory (Klingberg). We lose the ability to discriminate and to focus on what really matters in this abundance of information.  Journalists, too, operate at such intense velocity that context and perspective disappear. The driver of most journalism – immediacy – needs to be radically questioned. As Stuart Brand warns, ‘the price of staying perfectly current is the loss of cultural memory’ (2003).

There has been a counter-trend, however, in the resurgence of slower approaches and formats – both in long form journalism and its traditional home, the magazine. And especially in media made by independent producers. Slow journalism asks the question: how much news do we really need? And, when do we need it? This talk will look at many different examples of slow journalism emerging around the world, in print and online. It will argue that slower journalism can create a contemplative space of quality and pleasure that encourages attention and allows the life force of cultural memory to be sustained and absorbed.

Dr Megan Le Masurier began working for the Department of Media and Communications in 2005 and teaches in the undergraduate and postgraduate programs. She studied music at the Sydney Conservatorium, graduated with Honours in History from the University of Sydney and is now working on the book version of her PhD, ‘Fair Go! Cleo magazine as popular feminism’. Her professional life began briefly in the academy, fell happily into the magazine industry (writing and editing), and the CV is now beginning to read like there was a strategic rationale behind it all (there wasn’t!). She is currently researching small-circulation independent print magazines in a digital age, and developing a book on the genres of journalism with Fiona Giles.

3:00– 4:30pm, in the S226 MECO seminar room, Level 2 John Woolley Building (A20)<http://db.auth.usyd.edu.au/directories/map/building.stm?ref=d08h15>   entry off Manning Road, near the 19th century machine sculpture.

2nd May: ‘Constructing values in the news’
Dr Monika Bednarek and Dr Helen Caple

News values, the values that determine the newsworthiness of an event, have been researched from many perspectives and across several disciplines. They are said to impact heavily on journalistic practice and, as some argue, ‘govern each stage of the reporting and editing process’ (Cotter 2010: 73). In our own work, we take a complementary, discursive perspective from which we can conceptualize news values in terms of how newsworthiness is established through verbal and visual resources. A discursive perspective on news values allows us to systematically investigate how these values are constructed in the different types of textual material involved in the news process (e.g. press release, interview, images, news story).

Dr Monika Bednarek joined the Department of Linguistics after gaining her PhD at the University of Augsburg, Germany, in 2005 and extensive post-doctoral research at the University of Sydney (2006-2008) and the University of Technology, Sydney (2008-2009). This research focused, respectively, on evaluative language in the 'popular' vs. the 'quality' press, emotion talk across registers of English, and, most recently, the language of fictional television.

Dr. Helen Caple is a Senior Lecturer in Media, Communication and Journalism with the School of the Arts and Media at UNSW. In 2009, she completed her PhD on image-text relations in print news media with the Department of Linguistics at the University of Sydney. Current research interests include news values, text-image relations, visual storytelling and the role of picture galleries in online news reporting. Helen has worked on research projects investigating the portrayal of women in sports by the Australian Media (with JMRC at UNSW) and investigating visual storytelling techniques at the ABC. A training module on visual storytelling was developed for the ABC as a result of this project. Other research interests include Ecolinguistics (language and the environment) and Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory (genre and discourse analysis). In 2013, Helen was a Visiting Fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford, UK. Helen is also a former press photographer.

3:00– 4:30pm, in the S226 MECO seminar room, Level 2 John Woolley Building (A20)<http://db.auth.usyd.edu.au/directories/map/building.stm?ref=d08h15>   entry off Manning Road, near the 19th century machine sculpture.

5th June: ‘Global Activism in Food Politics: Power Shift’ (book launch)
Dr Alana Mann

Who should provide food, and through what relationships? Whose livelihoods should be protected? For over 20 years the peasant farmers of La Via Campesina have been engaged in a fight against injustice, hunger and poverty under the banner of food sovereignty, ‘the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems’. They campaign for healthy, sustainable alternatives to an industrial food system controlled by agribusiness companies and the architects of unfair trade agreements. This book draws on grounded case studies of agrarian movements in the Americas and Europe as exemplars of a ‘power shift’, as local opposition scales up to global action in an effort to wrest control of our food away from transnational corporations and back to communities.

Dr. Alana Mann is Senior Lecturer and Director of Degree, Master of Strategic Public Relations, in the Department of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney.

5:00– 7:00pm, in the S226 MECO seminar room, Level 2 John Woolley Building (A20)<http://db.auth.usyd.edu.au/directories/map/building.stm?ref=d08h15>   entry off Manning Road, near the 19th century machine sculpture.

13th June: ‘The public/private dichotomy of food politics’
Professor Andrew Calabrese

This talk will explore the contradictions inherent in representations and material manifestations of the local-global dichotomy as it pertains to issues of sustainability and environmental costs of food politics.

Professor Andrew Calabrese joined the Department of Journalism & Mass Communication of the University of Colorado, Boulder, in 1992. He previously worked at Purdue University, where he was on the faculty of the Department of Communication. He was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia in 1998 and a research fellow at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, in 1999. His teaching and research center mainly on the relationship between communication media and citizenship with an emphasis on theoretical and practical issues of media and globalization. He edits a book series called ”Critical Media Studies” for the publisher Rowman & Littlefield and serves on editorial boards of several research journals. He is a board member of the European Institute for Communication and Culture. Calabrese earned his BA from Denison University and his MA and PhD from the Ohio State University.

3:00– 4:30pm, in the S226 MECO seminar room, Level 2 John Woolley Building (A20)<http://db.auth.usyd.edu.au/directories/map/building.stm?ref=d08h15>   entry off Manning Road, near the 19thcentury machine sculpture.

Media at Sydney is presented by the Department of Media and Communications, University of Sydney

All seminars will be held on the University of Sydney Camperdown campus

For more information contact Dr Fiona Martin
T: 0428391122 or 02 90365098
E: fiona.martin at sydney.edu.au<mailto:fiona.martin at sydney.edu.au>
http://sydney.edu.au/arts/media_communications/
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