Monday 26 March 2007

University of Technology, Sydney, students are given space on the Web site of The Sydney Morning Herald. UTS, formed at the beginning of 1988 from the former NSW Institute of Technology, has a long history of training journalists.

The SMH's 'Grassroots' section is visible if you visit the NSW Election page of the Web site and scroll down a bit. It's on the right-hand side of the page.

This appears to be unprecedented. And welcome. Many trainee journalists have excellent writing skills. But they also can bring a different perspective to their reporting, before they have been 'retrained' in the newspaper's editorial rooms.

The story 'Concern over new police powers' by Kit Yap and Thao Tran, for example, focuses on an issue that might get a run in the monthly magazine The Big Issue (which is distributed solely through a network of unemployed people) but would be a marginal call for a major urban broadsheet like the SMH.

It has local resonance as well as displaying the kind of activism that students are well known for.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Dear Dean,
I happened to stumble across this website when googling my own name (as you do.)

I'm glad you liked Thao and my story. The only regret we ever had on all those stories we did was just how slack councillors, MPs and candidates for the State Election 2007 were.

Hence, many of our stories included comments from interested parties only (I do not include MPs as interested parties because they were, frankly, quite apathetic to important issues).

Anyway, thank you for noticing. It is great that at least one person cared about what we did.

Matthew da Silva said...

Hi Kit,

I think it's great that the Herald took advantage of the skills and drive of student journalists. It should happen more often.

Unknown said...

Hi Dean,
We are fortunate to have a number of UTS graduates currently working at the herald. Thus, they had enough faith in UTS Journalism to give us this rare chance at covering the issues we chose, with little interference!