Course content
Term One
New Media Innovation
This unit aims to explore areas where journalism and new media intersect. Focus will be on how new media innovation facilitates different forms and practices for news production, distribution, consumption and interaction. You will critically engage with key issues and debates facing a networked media landscape, where audiences as passive consumers make way for collaborative reporting, crowdsourcing.
Ways in which new media can complement and enhance existing journalistic processes will be at the forefront – including data journalism, increased transparency and accountability, as well as mobile news applications and augmented reality.
This unit also aims to equip you with an understanding of how to undertake developing online civic media projects for journalistic purposes.
Citizen Journalism & Social Reporting
This unit aims to provide you with a critical and systematic understanding of issues and debates relating to citizen journalism and social reporting.
You will examine how ordinary citizens, activists, grassroots and social movements are increasingly taking on the roles of journalists by utilising online and mobile communications in a spontaneous or bottom-up way to help report or make sense of challenges facing them.
When used in this way, participatory media such as blogs, wikis and social networks can be a democratising force and help empower citizens. Within this context, the role and purpose of traditional forms of mass media, what counts as ‘public service’ and who provides this in an online environment is subject of exploration.
However,you will also study sinister use of new media, as applied in repression of peoples across the globe – including propaganda, surveillance, totalitarianism, discrimination and mobilisation of violence.
Investigative Journalism
This unit seeks to examine the history and practice of investigative journalism, and consider its application in both traditional and online media.
It aims to offer you the fundamental skills required for this mode of reporting, expose you to a variety of writings in the genre, and provide insights into the key issues and debates around such journalism.
Term Two
Environment, Conflict & Crisis News
This unit aims to explore the ‘journalisms of crises’ – specifically, environmental disasters, war, terrorism and other conflict situations that are an integral part of the media coverage.
It will provide insights into the ways in which journalists report such news, the constraints they work under, and the potential influence their reportage could have on the crisis concerned.
The intention is to equip you with the theoretical knowledge and essential journalistic skills required to function in an informed, self-reflexive and safe manner in crisis situations.
Digital Magazines & Photojournalism
This unit aims to explore the forms and practices of magazine journalism and photojournalism as they are evolving in a digital era.
It will examine regular feature reportage and long-form journalism, as well as news photography, across several platforms of delivery in multimedia contexts. The purpose is to equip you with the skills necessary to write/produce appropriate content (written and visual) while, at the same time, developing a critical understanding of the challenges posed by digital media.
Researching Journalism & the Internet
The unit aims to provide you with a critical understanding of key issues in journalism and the internet, as well as with the methodological frameworks and scholarly skills required to research those issues. The key technological, political, social, economic, cultural and ethical implications of the internet for journalism will be used as the starting point from which you will be able to draw and link ideas, identify relevant scholarship, generate research questions and hypotheses and design a research project.
A range of research methods will be introduced, putting particular emphasis on emerging techniques for the study of journalism in a globalised and online environment.
Hence, the purpose of this unit is to enable you to formulate topical research questions, choose appropriate conceptual and methodological tools and produce a research proposal that they can then use for their final research project or dissertation.
Term Three
Dissertation or Journalism Project
You will undertake a self-conceived piece of independent research and produce an extended essay or piece of journalistic writing under the guidance of a nominated supervisor.
The unit aims to allow you to critically explore key issues and debates in journalism studies and allows you to develop a more specialised understanding in an area of their choice.
You will critically explore the relationship between journalistic practice and digital technologies. Where you undertake a project assignment, you must also objectify and explore relationships and values, using a variety of methods, and synthesise a reflective academically framed piece of work linked to the practical project, or a current critical issue in journalism.
The unit not only enables you to integrate, synthesise and extend the skills and knowledge so far acquired on the course but also acts as evidence of the extent to which you have met intellectual, technical and personal skills demanded of a Master’s graduate.
Subject to approval by nominated supervisor, this unit may be taken as distance learning.
Assessment
Knowledge and understanding, intellectual skills, subject skills and transferable skills are assessed for all outcomes through coursework, and exams where appropriate.
Coursework includes journalism pratical tasks, essays, and longer independent projects, and a Dissertation or Journalism Project. Sometimes work is assessed within groups.
Research Group Seminars
Students are also invited to attend our regular Journalism Research Group seminars, where scholars from Bournemouth University and prominent guest speakers present emerging research.
