Fairfax partners with journalism schools to encourage digital innovation
Fairfax Media will run a trial program with two universities, Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and RMIT University, which is aimed at getting students and journalists to collaborate on newsroom innovation and digital story telling.
The program, called “Innovation in Modern Journalism”, has been created by editor-in-chief of the Brisbane Times Simon Holt and will see more than 60 Fairfax staff involved in the unit, which if successful will become a permanent fixture of the journalism curriculum of the two schools from 2016.
It signals a move back to investing in career development for budding journalists by news providers, with News Corp also re-opening its cadet program, as they seek to train up students for the day-to-day rigours of the newsroom.
“Data experts, designers, product managers, app specialists, social media editors and others from the Fairfax Media network in Australia and New Zealand were approached to help share their expertise and provide modern newsroom insights,” said Holt.
Why on earth didn’t they do this years ago? As always with Fairfax, too little too late.
Now the Press are talking, even better, investing! Totally out of the blue, the media has finally risen to the challenge and embraced it as my one time boss, and mentor, Andrew Baxter (CEO, Publicis) suggests in his excellent new book Embracing the ever-evolving world of marketing’ (Googleto connect with him and obtain a copy). Back to Fairfax, when giants invest in the future, they can really makr it sing. Suggest, if Fairfax sticks to its srrategy, they could get right what the New York Times failed to- going beyobd as well!
No Sydney universities? I’d have thought UTS’s J-School would also be perfect for this sort of program?