Creating radio waves jeaa 2010 draft presentation

Editor's Notes

1. Creative commons picture from noodlesnacks Melbourne is Australia's second largest city, a diverse and multicultural city. Almost a quarter of Victoria's population was born overseas, and the city is home to residents from 233 countries, who speak over 180 languages and dialects and follow 116 religious faiths. Melbourne has the second largest Asian population in Australia, which includes the largest Indian and Sri Lankan communities in the country
2. Each dot indicates 100 persons born in Britain (dark blue), Greece (light blue), Mainland China (red), India (brown), Vietnam (yellow), Turkey (purple), Italy (light green) and (former states of) Yugoslavia (dark green). Based on 2006 Census data. Creative commons image from Kransky. The ethnic composition of the Australian population, coupled with the pursuit of a multicultural society at the official level emphasises the nature of the audience for Australia’s media – an audience that is ethnically, culturally and religiously diverse. Yet the content and coverage of the mainstream media does not reflect that diversity, with few guidelines for journalism professionals and no major paradigm shifts in the way newsrooms cover a multicultural society.
3. Journalism educators face challenges when teaching their students how to adequately cover the diversity of their communities, stemming from either resistance at institutional levels or a lack of structured approaches and guidelines (Nicholson 2003). The conclusion many educators reach is that future journalists emerge from university ill-equipped to deal with reporting stories that reflect the diversity of their communities (Curtis, 2010; Hernandez, 1995)
4. Studies on the journalistic selection of interviewees or talent demonstrate a reliance by mass media on the use of hegemonic sources who reflect dominant power hierarchies in ethnically diverse, multiracial societies. The use of sources who are predominantly male, representative of the elite, and non-minority has been identified as disproportionate (Kurpius, 2002; Hanson, 1991) while the breakdown of sources by gender has been shown that male sources and voices appear more often than females and are believed to reflect more authoritative roles (Armstrong, 2006; Kurpius, 2002). While women represent 52% of the world's population, only 24% of people who are interviewed are women, an increase from 17% in 1995 and 21% in 2005 (North, 2009). Female representation in journalistic sources was slightly higher in the Pacific region (in which Australia is situated) with 26% of people interviewed being women with the number of men featured in news stories also disproportionately higher, at 81% (North, 2009). The focus of these studies have historically been the diversity of sources in the United States or in professional newsrooms in Australia, with little research having been conducted on the selection of sources by Australian students in the course of their training as future journalists.
5. Included in the existing literature on diversity in journalism classrooms are strategies such as incorporating members of ethnic minorities as guest speakers or teaching staff (Hernandez, 1995), encouraging lecturers in journalism courses to work with organizations or other faculties or universities who promote diversity issues and discussion (Lawrence, 2010; Wagner, 2005) and incorporating multicultural training into the curriculum (Nicholson, 2003). Gilliam (in Hernandez 1995) believes that without such efforts minority voices, which are critical to challenging the dominant discourse of hegemonic forms of journalism, may be lost in the professional perspectives of journalism students, who are entering the media industry without being equipped to deal with the issue of reporting cultural diversity or on ethnically diverse communities.
6. The researchers set out to determine if the students enrolled in the three radio journalism courses run at RMIT were producing stories that represented a wide section of society via their selection of non-elite or non-hegemonic sources, or the ‘dial-a-quote’ voices available on mainstream radio. While the research did not set out specifically to study gender imbalances in the radio news bulletins, the number of male and female interviewees was included. The researchers determined if the interviewed talent was: male or female; indigenous; ethnic; independent, hegemonic or academic. The researchers also categorized each story involving indigenous and multicultural groups as being positive or negative or neutral for the communities represented
7. Journalism students at a university in Melbourne completed two newsroom production sessions for one of the city’s major community radio stations, as part of their assessment in a semester-long subject. Each session involved the preparation and presentation of a five minute news bulletin. The students made specific choices about their bulletins in the stories they chose to cover on a particular day, the interviewees they contacted to assist them in telling the story, the angle of each story, the way interviews were edited, and the order of the bulletin. This paper looks at the students’ choices of story and interviewee/talent, over a six week broadcast period in 2010. It reflects on the nature of the news organization for which the bulletins were produced, and the level of diversity or homogeneity found in the stories and the talent used to tell them. It also discusses what lessons may be contained for journalism educators, in the breakdown of stories chosen by students and the composition of interviewees/talent contacted by the students
8. In classrooms dominated by female students and taught by an entirely female staff -substantially more men were interviewed than women.
9. An independent voice was someone who suffered from diabetes, an academic was someone who worked at a university researching diabetes, and hegemonic could represent doctors, or even Diabetes Australia - those who have the ability to influence decision making. Under this scenario even the Ethnic Communities Council of Australia was considered hegemonic.
10. Triple R’s management has often complained that our news has been more influenced by 3AW news values. This shows that while sport is featured highly in this sports made city politics and international issues are given more coverage. Interestingly ethnic issues did not form a category of their own but were included most often into politics or human rights issues.
11. To our shame and concern there was no one indigenous story run during the period. However, to be fair the indigenous population of Melbourne is just 20,000 persons (0.6% of the population).
12. The researchers were shocked by their findings. It had been expected that a newsroom managed by female staff with a particular interest in ethnic and indigenous issues would oversee news bulletins for a community radio station with a greater number of independent voices and a wider representation of groups. The researchers intend to use the findings as a benchmark for the future measurement of diversity in student production classes. The results from this semester’s work will be compared to that produced by the students in the next academic year. In the meantime, further research needs to be done on ways to encourage the selection of non-homogenous talent and less copycating of mainstream stories. However, the researchers believe that the simple task of doing this content analysis, and sharing these results with the students, has created an environment in which students better understand the importance of a range of voices in radio news, not just for the sake of equity, but for the provision of a more interesting news bulletin to the listeners of the community radio station.