Luke Slattery | April 03, 2008
THE buzz around Melbourne media circles is that Michael Gawenda, former editor of The Age, Fairfax Washington correspondent and three-time Walkley winner, is soon to establish an Australian rival to Columbia University's renowned journalism school.
As founding director of the University of Melbourne's Centre for the Advanced Study of Journalism, Gawenda is hard at work building alliances with big media, as well as top-flight journalists at home and abroad, in preparation for the centre's opening in late February 2009.Though embedded in a university, he stresses, it will have a public rather than a scholarly mission. "It's not an academic centre. It's a centre for working journalists and editors, a place where we can have journalists do research, which I hope will result in published books and essays," Gawenda says.
"Part of the challenge is to get media companies on board in terms of funding and getting them into the position where they'll be prepared to let senior staff spend time here as fellows."
Item No.1 on his wish list for the public program is a speech by John Howard on politics and the media. Gawenda pledges to extend this invitation to Howard, though he flinches at reports of his speaker's fees.
"We might invite people like Peter Beattie, Steve Bracks, Peter Costello and Alexander Downer to talk about the way changes in the media have altered the pressures on politicians," he says.
In time the centre will serve as the public face of a full-fee graduate school of journalism, described by vice-chancellor Glyn Davis as an institution "set to address key challenges facing journalism practice in Australia and in other parts of the world through graduate academic programs and executive education and industry partnerships".
Gawenda envisages a symbiotic relationship between academics and senior journalists, who together may teach core subjects; a serious engagement between professions that tend to eye one another warily. "I do think that one of the problems with journalism courses in Australia is that they're not much admired by media companies and we need to do something about that," he says. "To change that would be a great achievement."
Never one for false modesty, he believes the centre has a good chance of success under his leadership because he brings a solid media profile to the role.
To install a respected academic in media studies, in contrast, would be to run the risk that calls to the ABC, News Limited or Fairfax would be met with: "Professor who?"
Asked if it's time to declare himself Professor Gawenda, the journalist ducks and weaves. "There would be an uprising were you to do that. But eventually ... who knows?"
In the months before the champagne corks fly at the official opening, he is attempting to hammer out a public program of lectures, workshops and meetings that he hopes will "get people talking about journalism, the media and the broader community. We don't explain all that well what we do. We don't open ourselves all that well to scrutiny.
"This is not to say that our focus will be negative. It's all about making a sort of space where we can make some contact with (the) public."
In this, Gawenda is working with Davis, a university head with an abiding interest in broadening the interface between academe and the public sphere.
Columbia, Gawenda admits, is a little beyond his aspirations. Rather, his models are the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Oxford, and Harvard's Shorenstein Centre on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, institutions dedicated to research, debate and discussion on aspects of journalism, with an activist flavour. As a member of the National Press Club in Washington, he was familiar with its high-toned journalists creed embossed on a plaque in the late 1950s.
"I believe in the profession of journalism," it reads. "I believe that the public journal is a public trust; that all connected with it are, to the full measure of their responsibility, trustees for the public; that acceptance of a lesser service than public service is a betrayal of that trust."
While the credo always sounded a little pompous to Gawenda's ears, he believes it touches on easily overlooked features of the profession.
"I think we journalists tend to forget, or lose touch with, our civic duty. What exactly are our civic responsibilities? The question of ethics and civic responsibility will most certainly be part of the centre's mission. I believe the question of accountability - to whom are we accountable and how is that accountability manifested? - is something we all should consider."