Journalism students show little interst in newspapers

Updated March 13, 2009 12:40:28

With the global economic downturn the newspaper industry around the world is in turmoil.

Profits are down and journalists are being layed off. But more than that the habits of younger news consumers are changing. Even those who aspire to be journalists. A new suvey of journalism students has found that more than 60 per cent read a printed newspaper only once a week or less.

Presenter: Sen Lam
Speaker: Alan Knight is Professor in Journalism and Media Studies at the Queensland University of Technology

KNIGHT: Well, we had a newspaper editor to speak to students and as we were walking to the lecture, he said I would really like to know what these kids are thinking. Why don't you send a couple of them around and I thought about it and well, rather than send a couple of them around, where they might be a bit overwhelmed, what about actually surveying an entire first year class to see what they thought and that's what I did.

LAM: Well, the budding journalists may not be reading newspapers, but one assumes they are getting accurate information elsewhere?

KNIGHT: Well, accurate is probably stressing it to far. Their preferred source, at this stage, is television news, primarily commercial television and then the internet and essentially if you looked at their online, the online places that they were interested in, you saw that in fact initially they nominated things like I've got it here, just pulling it out, nominated Google, Ninemsn, mainstream journalism sites, which included the ABC, but then Facebook and Wickipedia.

LAM: And as you say, they do watch a lot of commercial television. Are you concerned that their news diet may be superficial and parochial?

KNIGHT: Absolutely, well, some commercial television, without reflecting on all of my commercial television colleagues, many of whom are excellent professionals. Commercial television news is not exactly pitched at the Albert Enstein's of the community.

LAM: But does your study give any indication at all about the attitude of these journalism students towards news gathering information?

KNIGHT: Eh, I am going to explore that further. What with focus groups. I mean what we did initially was ask them more than 20 questions with open ended answers and what I am going to do, where this study is heading, I want to see what they think the future of the industry is and see if we can develop better ways of doing journalism. But, would you be interested in some of the things they said that would encourage them to read more newspapers.

LAM: Mm, Alan Knight, being a professor of Journalism and Media Studies yourself, do the results worry you?

KNIGHT: Yes, in so far as the quality journalism, one of its main sources is newspapers. It's a particular problem in the United States, where they don't have an ABC or a Radio Australia, or community radio and television to any great extent, not to the extent that we have. Yes, because newspapers employ a lot of journalists and they produce a lot of good journalism. So obviously that is why we selected first year students, because from here on in, we'll be saying to them, if you want to know about journalism, you also need to read newspapers to find out what is going on. But they don't like newspapers. They say that they are impractical. You have to buy them.

LAM; But do we know though whether or not they are accessing newspaper sites on the internet?

KNIGHT: They are some, but that's not their first priority by a long way.

LAM: And Alan Knight, you have also set up parallel studies in Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Hong Kong. Can you tell us a bit about this?

KNIGHT: Well, they will be launched in the coming weeks. I'm a board member of a group called the Asian Media Research Group, which is based in Singapore, at Nanyang University and we have membership across the region. And at the last board meeting, I raised with the board that we should in fact actually put up parallel studies in these places and the academics there agreed. So obviously I will be twigging the questions so that the students, the core of the study will remain the survey will remain the same, but the explanatory things. I mean some places they will not have community radio, for example, so it's useless asking them about community radio.

But yes, the plan is to take it to those places and we're doing that in the next couple of weeks. If we could ever get over the time zone differences, and it's been an enormous hassle. I'm doing a link up with the United Press International, their university's project and they are interested in actually spreading this to Europe and the United States as well.