WHERE is the best place in the Pacific to train our journalists - at university, or on the job as cadet reporters?
Today, in order of appearance, will be David Robie, formerly of the University of Papua New Guinea, but just appointed coordinator of journalism at the University of the South Pacific; and Pat Craddock, also of the University of the South Pacific, senior audio producer and associate lecturer in journalism; Dr Rodney Hills, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Papua New Guinea, and Jemima Garrett, a colleague and long-time journalist, a regular contributor to Pacific Islands Monthly, and who has been involved in media training in the Pacific.
Turning now to David Robie - your preference would be to train journalists at university or on the job as cadet reporters?
ROBIE: I think if the journalism program has a very strong practical aspect to it, universities would win hands down. You know, my background is a journalist from the school of "hard knocks" back in the Sixties. Certainly, in recent years, I have been involved in journalism programs in universities, and I think with the complexities of modern life and the range of skills that journalists need today, universities have the resources that make them better equipped to provide the necessary basic grounding for journalists.
So, your short answer would be, yes, it should be education, and at university level.
ROBIE: That's right. And also, put in the Pacific context, the University of Papua New Guinea in particular was one of the forerunners in 1975 with a programme which combined both the university environment, and a broader liberal arts education, with a very strong practical journalism course - which included such things as a 16-week fulltime attachment with a media organisation before the journalist graduates.
Pat, I was just wondering if I could ask you the 64,000 dollar question now - should a journalist be trained at tertiary level or should it be on the job at a newspaper, television or radio station?
CRADDOCK: The short answer, of course, is both. But if you look at a lecturer, who's trying to turn out a good journalist, what you can do at university is give them lots of exercises, instead of writing news items, going into a radio studio, writing something, screwing it up - and then you can do the analysis afterwards. It is hard to do that on a radio station, with the way radio stations are now very poorly staffed; newspapers are very poorly staffed. So the old idea of the cadet is really an antiquated idea, and you really can't do it.
So, the thing about university is that over three years, with good facilities, you can give the students, exercise and exercise, so that when they screw up the grammar, they screw up the voice, and use jargon like the Minister of Finance uses, you can talk about it all afterwards, and you can talk about it in groups. So, at the end of two or three years, you can turn out very competent journalists. And we do this all over the world - Australia, New Zealand, France, Britain - everywhere trains and turns out journalists through journalism schools.
Yes, I have heard it said though lately that the academics train at the expense of the actual principles of journalism. So they come out with wonderful theories, knowledgeable theories, but are not that good at journalistic principles, of good and fair reporting, and libel, slander - all those sorts of things.
CRADDOCK: The answer is, we sort of do both the principles and the practice. That's what it is all about, it's about both. Any university - any doctor for example, that's a parallel there; they do some theory, some practice. Journalism's just the same, you do theory/practice, practice/theory, back and forth, just like that.
Dr Rodney Hills, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Papua New Guinea, what are your thoughts on the matter - university or on-the-job training?
HILLS: Well, I guess I've got quite a personal but fairly strong view on this. It stems from the fact that, you know sometimes our students, coming in from their often rural backgrounds, and sometimes the narrow backgrounds of their schooling, have been weaker than they would be in a developed country. I think it is important that our students do have basic knowledge and skill competencies comparable with any student in any country which would enable them to study.
And that creates some tensions in the educational process with what I would describe as the professionally focused degrees. Because we've got to make sure, that this student is able to communicate, read and write well, make logical arguments and reach sensible conclusions. And sometimes if a student moves to a professional course some of those basics don't get thoroughly dealt with. My feeling is that we need to make sure that those elements do get dealt with.
Dr Hills, as I understand it, I think what you are saying is, Part A and Part B - yes, they should go to university, but for the practical side of journalism, specifically, that that should be elsewhere?
HILLS: Well, you see, I don't see a great deal of point in a university doing a lot of nuts and bolts training. We are here basically to teach people to think, and to develop their minds, and to develop their analytical capacities and the knowledge that goes with that. It may be that in a university one does do quite a lot of vocational study - after all, we do it in maths, we do it in law.
We won't get very involved in producing a newspaper or the mechanics of doing a radio programme. I'd rather see that kind of material, you know, handled on the job or practised at some kind of technical training institution while we would focus more on the intellectual side of media work. I mean one argument that I heard put around is that really you shouldn't teach media studies as undergraduate work, it should really be post-graduate, so that you are tackling people with a good subject background, who have been through general university education. Then you could give them a year or two of specialised training that's combined with work experience, to sort of round them off in a particular profession.
In countries like the United States, that's pretty common in law now. Then certainly, you know, medicine is now sometimes being taught at post-graduate rather than under-graduate level. So, there are lots of ways this can be done. I mean, I heard that you expressed that there is a need for a stronger knowledge base outside journalism among the students that we produce here. For example, if people are going to be reporting on the courts, it would be good if they had a stronger knowledge of the law.
You're listening to Pacific Focus on the Media, and my guests today, David Robie and Pat Craddock from the University of the South Pacific; Dr Rodney Hills, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Papua New Guinea; and journalist and fellow colleague at Radio Australia, Jemima Garrett. Jemima, what is your opinion today about the best approach to train a journalist? Is it at university level, or should it be on the job and adopting the cub type training that once was?
GARRETT: I think there's two elements to being a good journalist. One is the craft of journalism - whether you can write well, whether you know how to edit audio tape or video tape - and the other is the content, and that in many ways is the more important part: Do you understand how government works, do you understand the economy, the health system, vast areas of knowledge and information that you have to deal with everyday, and present it to people in a very clear and concise method. So, in many ways I see that probably journalism is something which should be tackled in university more than anything else, because the very essence of what you are dealing with is ideas and information.
Pat Craddock, you feel that the students from USP will actually have that when they leave your journalism course?
CRADDOCK: What's going to happen to journalism students who come out of this university is, they are going to be able to write on different subjects, you know, science, politics, economics. They are going to be able to write in much more depth than many of the journalists in the community who haven't had that training? Because you have somebody who studied economics, for example, for three years, and journalism, and they'll be able to write good articles on economics, and the same can be said on maths - anything like that. So, you are going to train journalists who have got skills in subjects as well as skills in writing.
GARRETT: If you look at some of the work for instance that David Robie did at the University of Papua New Guinea with his students, they spent a lot of time putting ideas and information into their student training newspaper, Uni Tavur, which was excellent. But it did take them a long time to learn how to express those ideas and information in a way that maybe fits into 200, 300, 500 words. It's not that easy to shrink things down to that level and to still make it clear and to not miss any of the most important points.
So, you perhaps think, Jemima, that the American system of it being a post-graduate course would be the approach?
GARRETT: I should think that's a very good idea. I mean, always when journalists in Australia ask me what to do, I say, well, go and do a degree in something, like do a degree in science, do a degree in economics, and then do a post-graduate diploma. That means you are genuinely expert in one area, you have something really vital to say, really knowledgeable to say. And then you learn the craft which you can apply to that.
But, I think probably the most important thing in the Pacific is that the course is practical. I think the area that some journalism schools fall down in, is getting too much into the theory of journalism, so semiotic - you know a lot of very difficult and inaccessible theory which is really not appropriate to people who basically want to go and write for newspapers, radio, or television. And perhaps that's the thing that leads people to say that journalism schools really are more useful outside universities.
But I also think it's very, very important that universities consider the good people they've got around them and take them on, and see the journalism course as a practical course. No one complains if you have a tourism course which is very practical. No one complains if you have an economics course which is very practical. It's only in journalism, and I think it's part of the way journalism is such a political job.
Journalists are always being blamed for various things, and certainly, you know, we are responsible for perhaps not doing things as well as we might in some instances. But, it's a very public job, everyone sees everything that you write when you are journalist. There is a lot of pressure, and I think that's all the more reason why it should be in a university, and people should be able to have time to get that content to put into their articles, and to really understand the way the system works. So, I think a practical journalism course, not too much high media theory, and turn out journalists who really can write and play responsible roles in the community.
In terms of the practical side of it, I just wonder in terms of equipment and all those sorts of things. They are fairly light on, in the Pacific. But also, there's the cultural overtone as well. How well placed would a journalist be after academic training to go back into his own society and perform as a journalist? We often hear the expression the "Pacific Way", and the "Pacific Way" isn't to once in a while ask a direct question - it's quite a process about getting information within a Pacific society. So I wonder when these journalists are trained, how they manage. Pat Craddock, perhaps I could start with you.
CRADDOCK: Sure, spot on. Its very, very difficult, but you cannot have journalism without asking questions, otherwise what happens is you publish the Prime Minister's press statement and the Minister of Finance's press statement in full, which is nothing more than just a sort of hand-out. So journalism is about asking questions, intelligent questions, sifting through the information. So, surely, they have a hard time.
We had an example here where several years ago, somebody wouldn't go to interview one of the chiefs, because it wasn't considered to be the right protocol. But I think you have to face that, and surely the best way to face it is in a safe situation with other young people where you can talk about it. And there is such a great deal of that going on - people talk about the Tongan experience, the Fiji experience, the Samoan experience, and so on. So they are learning from this interaction. But I agree it's pretty tough, but if you don't train journalists to ask questions, and they don't face up to this cultural change, they have problems. And let's face it, we are always in a period of change.
Dr Hills, do you know if the trained journalists have been getting a look at, having an impact on the men and women with whom they work?
HILLS: My impression is that actually, most of the journalists in Papua New Guinea are a pretty fearless group. I've been very impressed with them in that sense, I think. There's a very driving and open range of media works in this country. I haven't in all honesty noticed any tendency for people to feel in any way constrained.
David Robie, USP. Do you think there's a difference between Western and Pacific style reporting.
ROBIE: Well, frankly I'm tired of all these attitudes about "Western" journalism as such. Our programme, being in a developing country, has a whole range of knowledge and techniques that are being taught, and I wouldn't say that we fit into the Western model alone in the first place. We use a lot of techniques from the Philippines, for example - countries that have a strong free media in the developing world. There's somehow this idea among some people in the Pacific, that there's a sort of demarcation between "Western" journalism and "Pacific" journalism, whatever that might be. But the reality is that in good, vigorous, independent, journalism programmes in developing countries, the attitudes and the skills involved are not so much different from Western countries.
David, is there empirical evidence to support the suggestion that an academic based training is the better way to go to train journalists in the Pacific?
ROBIE: The University of Papua New Guinea has basically educated a generation of journalists; and the survey that was done by researchers from the University of Queensland five years ago shows that 68 per cent of Papua New Guinean journalists have a tertiary qualification, either a diploma or degree, compared with Fiji, which has only 16 per cent. And if one considers that the calibre and quality of journalists generally in Papua New Guinea is by far the highest in the region, it's very clear that there's a link between that and the long-standing university education of journalists.
Geraldine Coutts is the convenor of the Pacific Focus programme on Radio Australia.
