...and a good thing it is, too.
Oodallally, what a day.
I'm of the increasing opinion that sometimes things have to get incredibly dodgy in order for them to become good again. This concept can be applied across a variety of situations. It's the application of this concept to uni courses that I will be expounding on tonight.
I'm studying journalism at UQ, as I've said a couple of times before, and it's a program I thoroughly enjoy. I've learned a great deal about culture and politics and have earned some valuable skills which will help me, not only if I become a journalist, but indeed in any industry I choose. However the School of Journalism at UQ has issues, to say the least, and a prime example of this happened today.
One of the subjects I take this semester is called Newsroom Operations. It is meant to be a highly practical course to show us what it is like to work in a real, live newsroom, complete with deadlines, editorial policy and the like. The platform for this is a news website called NewSpace that we as students would develop and run. After using the first six weeks of semester to plan the running of NewSpace, the site was set to be launched this week. Anticipation was building among the students as we looked forward to having our work in the public domain via a site we had organised.
Today though, as I turned up for my first NewSpace editorial shift, any plans for a productive day of news gathering and dissemination were quickly thwarted. The Head of the Journalism School, who is new to UQ, had issued a memo to the staff and students advising us that NewSpace was not allowed on the web because a raft of procedures had not been completed. This list of procedures included gaining the approval of the University's Vice Chancellor and developing copyright guidelines, among other things, which could easily take weeks. There was a cursory apology and a reasoning that the NewSpace project and its related educational and experiential aspects could work just as well without going on the web.
We were incensed. Why were we only finding out about this now, seven weeks into semester? It was only reasonable to assume that any procedures regarding approval should have been completed long before the beginning of semester. Much of our assessment relied on NewSpace being an operational website. Furthermore, as a final year subject, one of the most appealing aspects of the course was the chance to work in a live news environment and have articles published for inclusion in our portfolios. Work experience and published stories are two of the most desirable qualities in journalism graduates as far as employers go. Not only that, but we students shelled out hundreds of dollars (and international students, thousands) for a subject which now didn't look like it will complete it's objectives. Yet another aspect is that about six other journalism subjects, such as Advanced Print, Radio and Television Journalism, were going to rely on NewSpace as a publishing platform.
We asked our lecturer about it and he explained that in previous semesters new publications, online or otherwise, had never had to go through any of these procedures. He too had only heard the news this week. This was an especial blow to him as NewSpace was his brainchild and he had fought hard to get the subject so far already. There was little he could do though; he couldn't even advise us on a course of action to protest against the announcement, for fear of being accused of undermining the Head of School. Politics! Drama!
Our lecturer left, giving us the option to take whatever course of action we chose: to continue with NewSpace as a private site if we liked; or to put NewSpace on hiatus while we appealed against the Head of School's announcement. We chose the latter and spent the morning drafting a letter of complaint. I was nominated as a student representative and went along with another girl to deliver our letter to the Head of School. He was rushed and not overly responsive to our appeal. In the abscence of satisfactory action from him, we will have to keep pushing through other avenues. We are organising a petition and if that is not persuasive enough we may have to go through the Student Union. Failing all else, we students may decide pay for our own domain name and form our own website.
We enrolled in subjects based on what they promised us in the course outlines. We need a forum for our work to be published so we can secure good jobs at the end of our degree. Isn't that why we're at uni in the first place?
From what I can see, this is only the tip of the iceberg as far as disorganisation in the UQ Journalism School goes. Which brings me back to my original point: sometimes things have to get really crap before they can get better again. Even just today I saw journalism students banding together to demand a better education. Maybe this will be a catalyst for more cooperation and hence more change around UQ Journalism. I hope so anyway. Stay tuned for further developments.
Journos do it to a deadline,
Teegs 