Blog Three

sourced from Wikipedia

Esther Wojcicki is a media professional. Her biography can be found on the very reliable wikipedia.

Alright, but seriously here are some bio’s from Huffington Post and Creative Commons about her work for the Journalism program at Palo Alto High School in California.

Student Journalism; Three benefits of newspaper programs is a link to an article which lists all the benefits of having a student based newspaper, especially but not exclusively for journalism students.

Although the article refers to high school students, the same principles she mentions also apply for university students.

Esther talks about a three week cycle for the publication, the first week to come up with stories, the second week to write the stories and the third week for publication. The benefit of this cycle is that there is plenty of time to produce stories, perhaps longer form investigative stories. A downfall however is that news is not news in three weeks, so the stories published on the website wont be hard news.

The website/ newspaper that would be created for UC would be similar, except it would work on tighter time constraints. For example, saturday, sunday and monday for coming up with stories, tuesday and wednesday for writing stories and thursday working on the production so the publication comes out on a friday. The benefits of this being that we can produce hard news stories, which appeal more to employers who may be watching the site.

Blog Two

With my area of interest being a webiste to promote the talent of UC Journalism students, the NowUC website also showcases work from students.

The NowUC website is run by one of the lecturers here at UC, and it requires very specific filing procedures and is work is usually posted as a result of submitting it for an assignment. There is one administrator for this website, and they chose which stories to publish and which ones not to. This reduces the work that gets published dramatically, and also the readership of the website. If it was more open, with different perspectives and different forms of journalism I think it would be more successful as it would appeal to a wider audience.

The University of Canberra website has a news tab on the opening page.

This news section has stories specifically about students of the Uni or events happening at the campus. This is great for regular readers of the UC website, and those that are interested in other areas of the uni, however this only caters for a very niche market and couldn’t be supported if it were seperated from the main website.

Blog One

A group of 14 Journalism students from the University of Canberra travelled four long hours on a bus to Sydney to attend the Australian Centre for Investigative Journalism Conference, held at ABC and UTS over two days.

Over these four long hours, up and back from Sydney, discussion broke out as to the opportunities for Journalism students at UC. Yes, there is the newly formed UC Press Club. And yes, there is UCFM for students to get involved. And yes, there is the student magazine Curio. And yes, NowUC is a website where student stories get published.

The collective thought however was one of dismay, as a few students piped up that their stories had been rejected from Curio, and that NowUC was used mostly for submitted assignments.

Mentions were made about creating a student newspaper, or a website.

A website where students can post their articles!