MLitt/PgDip Digital Journalism

This class introduces you to the professional demands of multimedia journalism, equipping you with the techniques needed to create effective digital packages.

You'll learn about:

• news values
• generating ideas and sources
• online research techniques
• interviewing
• mobile media
• creating news
• features
• live blogs
• interactivity
• digital story-telling techniques
• audio/video recording and editing

This class enables you to develop a critical understanding of digital journalism production processes by working in a simulated news room over several weeks.

As a team you devise, launch and produce your own online publication and create a social media strategy to market it.

You'll gain direct experience of multimedia news operation through generating ideas, undertaking editorial planning, preparing content, and designing and editing pages. 

Most journalists are expected to demonstrate a detailed awareness of the journalist’s rights and responsibilities in their reporting.

You'll learn about:

• the Scottish legal system
• court structures and procedures
• defamation
• contempt of court
• legal restrictions on reporting courts, parliament and government
• copyright
• confidence and privacy including human rights legislation and media regulatory systems

This class gives you an understanding of key ethical issues in professional journalism, developing skills in recognising and solving ethical problems.

You'll learn about a journalist’s ethical responsibilities to their employer, target audience and the wider community.  

It'll enable you to analyse and critique key debates, apply appropriate ethical concepts, and develop an awareness of the professional choices that journalists face.

This class is a collaboration with the prestigious Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship, part of the globally renowned Strathclyde Business School.

It aims to increase your employability by allowing you to develop your entrepreneurial ideas in a risk free environment and learn about generating ideas, business planning, funding, developing a portfolio career and personal branding.

You'll also participate in an intensive week of workshops on creating new ventures.

This class explores the implications and futures of digital technology in communication. The class incorporates the range of digital communication, from mediated conversation, through social media, to blogging and the production and distribution of video content. The importance of the digital environment for politics and the labour market will also be explored. The class will also look at the transformative implications of digital communication for the culture industries, including music, television and cinema, along with the legal and regulatory implications of digital content in an international setting.

This class offers advanced study of the dominant media and communication theories, and their application across a number of international contexts and media platforms. As well as discussing a number of traditions in communication research, the class will reflect critically on trends and texts across a number of media contexts and genres, including popular cultural platforms and the coverage of politics. The class will also look to the implications of international media on the mediation and public understanding of international coverage of conflict and terrorism.

This class will acquaint you with the field of strategic communication and the major theories of persuasion. It will explore the process of communicating purposefully from its different stages and thus help you form a well-rounded theoretical understanding of its many facets and complexities. The class will also combine theory and practice by asking you to apply the acquired theoretical perspectives onto professional scenarios.

This allows you to explore a journalism studies topic at length through robust research methods and analysis.

Suitable subjects include:

• journalism ethics
• the media’s institutional and financial frameworks
• the practice of journalism including textual usage, social media and media effects
• journalism’s social context

The production dissertation enables you to investigate and produce a piece, or a series of pieces, of original digital journalism at length. You will create a substantial multimedia artefact/project of your own work that demonstrates high quality journalism skills and technical proficiency. You will utilise a range of appropriate story-telling platforms e.g. online, audio, video, photography, interactivity, captions and graphics in order to effectively interpret your chosen subject.