University of Melbourne launches new media site The Citizen
The Centre for Advancing Journalism has this morning launched a new online media site The Citizen, which is centred around the idea partnering professional journalists with citizen and student journalists.
The project is being lead by journalism academic Margaret Simons who will serve as editor-in-chief while the site itself is edited by veteran journalist Simon Mann, who was previously a senior reporter with The Age.
Simons, who is director of Centre for Advancing Journalism and an occasional contributor to newsletter Crikey, said: “This is the start of something and it will grow, increase and hopefully make a positive contribution.”
The project will be the flagship for the centre and will combine the Centre’s teaching, research and engagement goals and will included contributions from both students at the Centre’s masters program and also professional journalists. “It will showcase all of our work and as a teaching tool where our students are getting experience in writing to deadline and with real publication imperatives,” she said.
“We want it to be a serious media outlet, seeking a general audience and while we can’t do everything we will be focusing on areas of need and we will doing some innovative things and experimenting with journalistic methodology.”
Funded with a mixture of university and philanthropic funding, The Citizen has launched with a number of prominent professional journalists submitting pieces. Among the launch contributors are former Age editor Michael Gawenda and Sunday Age editor Gay Alcorn with pieces by other journalists such as former Herald Sun reporter Russell Robinson and former Sunday Age international editor Tom Hyland to follow.
In a piece describing the mission of the site editor of The Citizen Simon Mann wrote:
Our intention is just to produce good journalism, sourced from the students in the University’s Master of Journalism program and from industry professionals.
And we’re mixing things up a bit, too, embracing a different way of working, a kind of ‘pro-am’ in which seasoned reporters collaborate with our students. We reckon there is no better way of teaching a new generation of journalists than getting them to work alongside respected and experienced practitioners.
Mann told Mumbrella that it would be interesting to see the results of this approach and that further projects, involving students and professional journalists, would be published in the coming weeks and months. “We hope to reach out and do a few different things and maybe collaborate with other new media site, citizen journalists etc. Meg likes to talk about us as a research-in-action project where we will evolve and try a few things,” he said.
“It gives us something different… this idea of professional journalists working with citizen journalists and our twist on that is to bring in industry professionals like Gay Alcorn to collaborate with our students.”
Nic Christensen
I can’t find the site RSS feed — which means I’m not going to be able to subscribe and read it. *sigh*
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In Queensland we’re doing something similar with CitizenJ. Graduates, students and active members of the community can become contributors.
We offer free workshops, one-on-one support with facilitators, equipment for loan, a community newsroom space, publication through CitizenJ (found at http://citizenj.edgeqld.org.au/ ) and our publishing partners. We also host the Walkley Media Talks in Brisbane and fund experimental journalism projects (watch this space, we’ve just decided on the four recipients of round two funding).
I’m really impressed with the heavy involvement of journalism industry professionals in The Citizen. Great point of difference.
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