Celebrating Fresh Thinking
Professorial Lecture Series
Join me in celebrating the very substantive contribution to academe made by Professor Donald Matheson in the next presentation in the Professorial Lecture Series for 2022.
Date: Thursday, 14 July 2022, from 4.30 – 5.30 p.m.
Location: F3 Forestry
I encourage all staff and postgraduate students to attend this lecture, to actively support our new Professors, and take the opportunity to appreciate the fantastic research being undertaken in parts of the university we may be less familiar with.
Presentation details:
“What the changing form of news means for public communication” – Presented by Professor Donald Matheson, Te Tari Mātai Pāpāho | Department of Media and Communication
In the early twentieth century news journalism settled on a dominant form for telling the news, in which the news text took on authority for attesting to what happened in the world. A whole range of factors have made that textual practice and its implicit epistemology less tenable. Journalists have been experimenting for the past 20 years with less packaged, more raw, and more reflexive ways of telling stories about reality, which place journalists in different relationships to their sources and their publics, to the extent that we can claim journalism has entered a new era. This lecture will examine some of those practices of producing the words and images of the news, including the emergence of new digital forms such as social media reporting and live blogs. It will also discuss the implications of these developments for publicness in Aotearoa New Zealand and for how we theorise publicness. Thinking about quality in journalism in these textual practices emerges as more of an ethical project about the quality of the relationships fostered within the public and about mutual intelligibility in society than an epistemic one focused on facticity.
