Barbara Dreaver, Nicky Hager talk investigative reporting at AUT

Some of the PMC graduating journalists covering the MIJT conference this weekend - Rose Rees-Owen (second from left), Hamish Fletcher and Pacific Media Watch editor Alex Perrottet - along with PMC director David Robie and chair John Utanga (right).

AUT University

Anyone with an interest in writing, reading or studying investigative journalism, will benefit from a conference at AUT University this weekend.

Speakers at the conference, which organisers have dubbed a “fourth estate conversation”, will examine investigative journalism in New Zealand and the Pacific, both now and into the future.

Many experienced journalists including TVNZ’s Pacific correspondent Barbara Dreaver; publisher of the Nepali Times Kunda Dixit; New Zealand investigative journalist Nicky Hager; and director of the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism Professor Wendy Bacon, will share their perspectives.

And for student journalists and newly qualified journalists a masterclass will give them the opportunity to learn about the techniques of investigative journalism from a team of international journalists.

“Our aim is to start a conversation about the future of investigative journalism in New Zealand and the Pacific. In particular, we will be looking for new ways to help investigative journalism thrive,” says conference chair and director of AUT’s Pacific Media Centre, Associate Professor David Robie.

“Cutbacks in specialist staff and reduced resources have had a negative impact on investigative reporting in many media organisations. This conference will focus on independent funding models and strategies in collaborative investigations, and hopefully lead the set-up of a new group to support investigative journalism in New Zealand.”

The conference aims to raise awareness of investigative journalism in all its forms, so exhibitions and screenings of photojournalism, documentaries and multimedia presentations, are a key part of the programme.

A highlight will be the launch of the Frames of War photojournalism exhibition by keynote speaker Kunda Dixit.

What: Media, Investigative Journalism and Technology Conference 2010
Where: AUT University Conference Centre, AUT University (City Campus)
When: 4 & 5 December 2010
Exhibition launch: Ground Floor, AUT Tower Building, 6pm, Saturday, December 4
Abstracts: www.ciri.org.nz/conference2/abstracts.html
Programme: www.ciri.org.nz/conference2/programme.html
Registration/Info: www.ciri.org.nz/conference2/index.html
Contact: Andrea Steward, conference organiser 0273382700

• The power of a war-and-peace picture - all 179 of them
• 'Forgotten' Ngatihine foresty land rights issue comes to life
• Pasifika among top investigative journalism case studies
  

Key speakers lining up for investigative journalism conference

From TOKTOK: Pacific Media Centre newsletter

Several key speakers are being lined up for the Media, Investigative Journalism and Technology 2010 conference being organised by the Pacific Media Centre at AUT University in December.

Australian Centre for Investigative Journalism director Professor Wendy Bacon, Nepali Times editor Kunda Dixit and New Zealand’s leading investigative journalist Nicky Hager, author and a frequent contributor to the Sunday Star-Times on intelligence and environment issues, are among the key speakers.

The programme will feature preview clips of investigative film maker Jim Marbrook’s documentary Cap Bocage about indigenous land, mining and the marine environment in New Caledonia, an exhibition of Dixit’s photojournalism collection of the 10-year Maoist war in Nepal and many innovative investigative projects.

A student masterclass in investigative journalism is also being planned.

Peer-reviewed papers will be published in a special edition of Pacific Journalism Review in May 2011.

The conference, to be held on December 4-5, 2010 is dedicated to exploring investigative journalism and documentary techniques, methodologies and technologies of critical value to public interest issues and to identify and support journalists, photographers and film makers facing pressures and obstacles.

Pressures faced by investigative journalists include resistance from publishers, editors – due to time and resource constraints – and also post-publication and legal issues.
Pacific presentations are encouraged.

Other stories in the latest Toktok include:

* Journalism diploma, specifically for Pasifika
* Tribute to SI women - high cost in rise to the top
* PMC director calls for greater global outreach by NZ j-schools
* PMC students cover Forum
* Sabbatical 2010
* New Pacific journalism course advert

Picture: A girl breaks down in tears while telling her experiences about being abducted from her school by Maoist rebels. Photo from the PEOPLE WAR exhibition of 50 images for the investigative journalism conference. Photo by Depeendra Bajracharya

Conference website
Keynote speakers
Papers, proposals
Registration
Conference on the PMC Facebook page

Latest PJR poses ‘price of freedom’ challenge

Pacific Media Centre

Editors, journalists and media researchers face the challenge of the “price of freedom” and the cost of reporting global conflict in the latest edition of Pacific Journalism Review.

Writing in the edition, Shooting Balibo author Tony Maniaty, who was a consultant for a recent film on the killing of six Australian-based journalists – including a New Zealander – in East Timor, makes a strong plea for wider acceptance of international humanitarian laws.

“As a first move ... we need to stop viewing and presenting war as an heroic enterprise, and see it for what it fundamentally is – an inhuman, horrific and desperate act by people devoid of imagination, for whom brute force is not the last resort, but usually the first,” he says.

Maniaty, of the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism (ACIJ), is a guest speaker at a war reporting seminar being organised by the International Committee of the Red Cross and the New Zealand Red Cross in partnership with AUT University and its Pacific Media Centre (PMC) on May 24.

The special edition of the journal, published by the PMC, highlights the new Australian code to protect the safety of journalists and notes the lack of an equivalent for New Zealand media.

The edition will be launched at the seminar, which will include a screening of the film Balibo and a debate about the cutting edge of journalists’ safety in war zones by leading war correspondents TV3’s Mike McRoberts, TVNZ’s Sunday current affairs programme presenter Cameron Bennett and independent journalist Jon Stephenson.

Both Bennett and Stephenson have commentaries featured in the journal, which has published a series of papers from war reporting conferences co-hosted by the ICRC, Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the ACIJ in Sydney, and ICRC, New Zealand Red Cross and Massey University in Wellington, in May last year.

New York-based Reuters global multimedia editor Chris Cramer writes on the “challenges to journalists’ safety and welfare” and has recorded a video message for the Auckland seminar.

“Is the industry in such a mess, in such chaos and crisis, that fair and balanced reporting from conflict zones, as well as other locations, is simply too expensive for much of the industry to bear?” he asks in PJR.

“Who does the reporting when reporters can’t afford to get on an aircraft? Even drive a few hundred kilometres to cover the story? What price a free press if our business models can’t sustain our work?”

Contributors to the edition include journalists on both sides of the Tasman, media educators, lawyers, Red Cross figures, war correspondent trainers and military media minders.

Other unthemed research articles published include political blogs on Fiji – a ‘cybernet democracy’ case study, local news in community broadcasting and an analysis of Pacific Island nations’ climate change strategies at Copenhagen 15.

Editors of this edition are Professor Wendy Bacon of the ACIJ, PMC director Dr David Robie and Alan Samson of Massey University.

Pacific Journalism Review
New Zealand Red Cross
More information on the seminar

Public right to know - new PJR edition

Pacific Media Watch

Trauma and exiled writers, the challenge of environmental journalism in Delta land, issues of editorial “slant” in health reporting and use of te reo Māori in newspapers are some of the topics featured in the latest edition of Pacific Journalism Review.

The October edition is a special “Public right to know” joint issue published by the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism and AUT University’s Pacific Media Centre.

A selection of eight peer-refereed papers, mostly drawn from the PR2K7 conference with the theme “Giving them what they want” (PR2K), has been published in this edition co-edited by professor Wendy Bacon, director of the ACIJ.

The PR2K conferences, which have been held regularly since 2000, have mostly focused on how the right of people to know what is happening has been frustrated by legal, political and social constraints on the media in the Asia-Pacific region.

“While these key concerns remain, in 2007 and 2008 the conference organisers challenged participants to present papers which explored how contemporary media developments are shaping and being shaped by new relations with the public,” Bacon writes in the editorial.

Bacon herself contributed a major role in one of the key research articles, along with two Bangladeshi colleagues, about the urgency of environmental coverage of Delta land, showing up the “neglect” of reporting ecological devastation by Australia and New Zealand media in some parts of the region and why change is needed.

This year is the Year of Climate Change in the South Pacific and several small island nations have stretched their resources to provide better environmental reporting.

John Carr focuses on journalism as storytelling and argues that a “viable public sphere” needs narrative templates for critical social, political and environmental issues that need to engender a sense of shared participation.

John Roberts and Chris Nash examine the reporting by two Sydney newspapers of the controversial issues of a safe injecting room in the face of complaints of bias.

Investigative journalism
Marni Cordell presents a pilot study on the state of investigative journalism in Australia with a focus on the ABC’s flagship Four Corners programme. PMC director associate professor David Robie provides a comparative case study on the controversial Fiji news media “review” in the lead up to the regime imposing martial law and censorship at Easter.

Other articles outside the main PR2K theme include a study of the “intentional use” of te reo Māori in New Zealand newspapers in 2007 by the Kupu Taea project at Massey University, a comparative study of teenage views on journalism as a career in Australia and NZ by professor Mark Pearson of Bond University, and a New Caledonian mediascape from aid analyst Nic Maclellan.

The review section includes a feature essay on the book Shooting Balibo written by Tony Maniaty about the murders of the “Balibo Five” television reporters and journalist Roger East by invading Indonesian troops in East Timor in 1975.

This edition, co-edited by Jan McClelland and Dr Robie, has been dedicated to AUT research administrator Jillian Green, who had been a strong colleague, friend and supporter of PJR and this month lost her struggle with cancer.

The next edition of PJR has the theme “reporting conflict” in association with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and will be published in May 2010.

• Pacific Journalism Review can be ordered on the PJR website www.pjreview.info or through the ACIJ www.acij.uts.edu.au

• Call for papers for May 2010.
• Pacific Journalism Review