News Corp Australia has teamed up with its former foe, Google Australia, to establish the Digital News Academy to send hundreds of journalists to a university business school for training in “unashamedly commercial journalism”.
Murdoch’s corporate affairs executive Campbell Reid will be the inaugural head of the Digital News Academy (DNA) and News Corp big name writers Joe Hildebrand, Hedley Thomas and Sharri Markson will be on tap for students as “experts”.
More than 250 journalists from News as well as Australian Community Media and some smaller media, will do the nine-month course each year through University of Melbourne’s business school, a move which has angered journalism academics at the Victorian university.
The director of the Centre for Advancing Journalism at the University of Melbourne, Andrew Dodd, said the first he heard of the move was when he read the press release.
“Our concern is that the training is happening through the business school,” Dodd told Guardian Australia. “And that News Corp is seeking to work with the business school so as to avoid the kind of questioning culture of liberal arts and humanities faculties. It’s a reflection really of the antagonism that News Corp has had for university journalism programs over many years.”
Reid told Guardian Australia the business school was chosen “because it’s unashamedly about the business of journalism” and they wanted to design a curriculum from the ground up.
Reid said the academy would teach students to do journalism which was “fit for a commercial purpose right from the moment of creation” because the public was prepared to pay for “trusted news sources” through subscriptions.
Times had changed and journalists now needed to be aware of how to reach the target audience for a podcast or a piece of data journalism, he said.
News Corp Australasia’s executive chairman Michael Miller said the academy would build a stronger Australia “by keeping society informed through strong and fearless news reporting and advocacy”.
“The academy will play a role in equipping news media organisations and news professionals – from on the ground reporters to editors and publishers – with the toolkit, skillset and mindset to meet the opportunities that digital media provides,” Miller said.
It was only 12 months ago that Google signed a multi-year deal with News Corp that led to the search engine paying for journalism from news sites around the world. The deal followed years of Murdoch interests blaming the search engine for killing the business model of newspapers.
The idea for the school was launched during negotiations for the news media bargaining code between News executives and Google Australia’s managing director Melanie Silva.
The dean of Melbourne Business School, Ian Harper, declined an interview but said the academy was a “profound education initiative”.
“We believe the Digital News Academy has the potential to transform the future of organisational learning, as well as journalism,” Harper said.
Reid said the school would attempt to replace the institutional knowledge of newsrooms lost over many years of attrition. “Not that long ago an entry-level journalist would be surrounded by people who would be both curmudgeons and generous with their time and expertise,” he said.
“But the throbbing heart of a newsroom is not as vibrant as it used to be.”
Reid acknowledges the tension between News and journalism schools which Dodd believes is behind the move, but he said the business school was not chosen for this reason. “There’s no doubt that at News over time there has been tension or scepticism about some of the journalism schools, and I must say extraordinary scepticism in the journalism schools about News Corporation,” he says.
Honorary principal fellow at the Centre for Advancing Journalism, Meg Simons, said it was “incomprehensible” that the university “has apparently entered into this arrangement without consulting its journalism school”.
“You can’t teach the technical skills divorced from all the rest of journalism,” Simons said. “Journalism happens within a context, a social and an economic context.”
Professor of journalism at New York University Jay Rosen went even further, saying that in the US they don’t put business schools in charge of journalism training, “just as we don’t house dramatic writing courses, or a master’s degree in film-making there”.
“It says it wants to train the next generation of journalists in how to tell the story of Australian communities,” Rosen said. “It was my impression that the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Advancing Journalism did that work, but they seem to have been cut out of the deal. I would expect that from the Murdoch companies. I would not expect Australian journalists and academics to go along with it.”
Reid said Google’s financial support for the school was not part of the news media bargaining code deal.
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