MCH2060 : Multimedia Journalism I
- Offered for Year: 2024/25
- Module Leader(s): Mr Chris Stokel-Walker
- Owning School: Arts & Cultures
- Teaching Location: Newcastle City Campus
- Capacity limit: 50 student places
Semesters
Your programme is made up of credits, the total differs on programme to programme.
| Semester 2 Credit Value: | 20 |
| ECTS Credits: | 10.0 |
| European Credit Transfer System | |
Aims
This module aims:
- To instil an understanding of elementary conventions and good practice in telling stories through a variety of media in use within journalism.
- To assist students in developing skills in clear, concise writing, reporting and editing and in telling stories using the written word, audio and video media.
- To consider and assess the ethics of writing, the aims and objectives of journalism, and to consider the processes that take place within the journalist–medium–audience nexus, that inform the practice of multimedia journalism.
- To practise, produce, appraise and edit journalistic outputs produced using audio recordings, stills and moving images.
-To assess the role and significance of multi-platform storytelling in contemporary mass media, and to be mindful of good practice.
This practical, hands-on module will introduce students to those key skills of newsgathering, interviewing, writing and editing for online media production.
You will learn methods for identifying stories for an online community, including online newsgathering, production and editorial in a mix of media forms, and verification of online sources.
You will learn how to tell stories using a combination of text, moving pictures and sound recordings in order to bring out the best in any particular story. You will learn how to present the same story in different formats, identifying best practices at the cusp of the future of the media.
You will be introduced to genres, conventions and standards in practices in multimedia journalism.
Outline Of Syllabus
This module is aimed at students who wish to develop cutting-edge skills necessary to the field, in addition to a critical awareness of the form, its purpose and its function in the wider journalistic (and social) environment.
The syllabus of this module will largely concern those processes and protocols involved in the production of multimedia journalism. The sort of topics covered will therefore draw from the following:
- Journalism for the web: convergence
- Mobile Journalism (MOJO): planning and practice
- Newsgathering and editing in the field
- Styles of online journalism (including copy editing and technical specifications)
- Exercising journalistic judgement in sourcing appropriate interviewees
- Scripting, researching and producing short news items in video formats
- Scripting, researching and producing short news items in audio formats• Innovative approaches to digital storytelling
- Verifying online resources
- Intermediate video editing and postproduction
Workshops will enable students to critically appraise the significance of the skills they learn as they go.
Teaching Methods
Teaching Activities
| Category | Activity | Number | Length | Student Hours | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Scheduled Learning And Teaching Activities | Lecture | 11 | 1:00 | 11:00 | On-campus lectures |
| Guided Independent Study | Assessment preparation and completion | 100 | 1:00 | 100:00 | Researching, writing up copy, interviewing, producing multimedia, applying style, writing up field notes into reflexive essay |
| Scheduled Learning And Teaching Activities | Small group teaching | 11 | 2:00 | 22:00 | On-campus workshops (can be delivered synchronously online if necessary) |
| Guided Independent Study | Skills practice | 60 | 1:00 | 60:00 | Practise of key skills covered in lectures and in synchronous workshops |
| Guided Independent Study | Project work | 1 | 7:00 | 7:00 | Preparation of summative project idea |
| Total | 200:00 |
Teaching Rationale And Relationship
Learning activities take a range of forms on this module, each intended to enhance the learning experience, and to help students achieve key learning outcomes in a structured and iterative accumulation of skills and knowledge.
Workshops will help students to develop their critical thinking alongside others in their peer-group, allowing for a more collaborative approach to learning. This pedagogic model also involves a reactive approach to understanding and engagement across the cohort, meaning that the pace of delivery may more easily reflect students' technical abilities and rate of learning.
Skills practice will be the dominant feature of this course, and best practice in multimedia journalism will be encouraged both in class time and in independent study.
Directed research and teaching is a minor, but nevertheless crucial, component of this module; it is essential that students learn to critique 'best practice', from its origins at the dawn of the internet to the present day.
Independent study will allow students the opportunity to develop their own understanding or practice, through the body of literature on 'best practice' across a number of aspects of multimedia journalism.
Teaching on this module is supported by learning activity as part of the Civic Journalism Lab workshop and guest lecture series.
Assessment Methods
The format of resits will be determined by the Board of Examiners
Other Assessment
| Description | Semester | When Set | Percentage | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Design/Creative proj | 2 | M | 100 | 1 x 500w news report, 1 x 800w explainer, 1 |
Zero Weighted Pass/Fail Assessments
| Description | When Set | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| Written exercise | M | This assessment (ethics form) is not graded and therefore does not contribute to the module mark but must be passed in order to pass the module. |
Assessment Rationale And Relationship
The assessment methods employed in this module relate closely to key elements in its outline of work. These assessments are designed in order to allow students to develop a grounding in the theory and practice of multimedia journalism.
The assessment components individually refer directly to key skills and practices in multimedia journalism, in terms of the editorial production of written (and image-based) texts, audio and video online. Informal preparation for the assessment components (a project pitch, and feedback in copy clinic on a news story draft) contribute to students' learning in the summative design project assessment. Iterative feedback encourages the re-enforcement of key learning outcomes.
In terms of the sequence and schedule of assessments, these will be staggered throughout semester. In turn this will provide the module leader with a better means of gauging students' progress in the module and will help identify suitable interventions (and provision of extra skills support) where this is necessary. This is particularly important as it will mitigate the disparity in students' understanding of the application of multimedia theory to practice, in a field where some students may start from a more advanced skill level than others.
The word counts for MCH2060 project components are as follows:
- 500 word news story
- 800-word explainer
- One up-to-two-minute video for TikTok or Instagram (of no fixed word count)
- One up-to-fifteen tweet Twitter thread, that may contain audio, video or infographics
- A 500-word reflection on why they chose the story in individual ways, and how they did what.
All four journalistic pieces will be around the same story. This is designed to get students thinking about the journalistic validity of their choice of story, and the ability to fully be “across” a story, both in terms of type of written journalism produced, and in types of multimedia journalism.
Each student must submit a 200-300 word explanatory pitch, which sets the project in its relevant beat/audience/mix of mediums used for approval by the module leader early on in the module.
Reading Lists
Timetable
- Timetable Website: www.ncl.ac.uk/timetable/
- MCH2060's Timetable