Reporting Refugees Academic Blog

REPORTING REFUGEES

Semester two of 2011 has exposed me to more refugee and asylum seeker policy, media coverage and discussion than I have ever been exposed to before.  This experience has assisted in changing my views on asylum seekers and the current policy dramas that are occurring in the Australian federal government.

McMaster (2001) and Dunn et al. (2007) both show how the current publicly perceived problem with refugees and asylum seekers can be traced back to the ‘boat people’ dramas were handled in the early 2000’s by the Howard government.  Both works also link the problem with how these people who are fleeing their own country are represented in the media, which is something that is focused on in McKay et al. (2011).  The way the media portrays refugees and asylum seekers is what has shocked me the most during the course of this project.  Another thing that shocked me is how people who arrive in Australia, looking for asylum, are treated in detention centres and in the community.  Briskman and Cemlyn (2005) and Silove et al. (2007) delve into this in further detail in their relatively recent works.

Other Leagues: Post 8 – Viability Argument

Through these blog posts I have come to realise that my area of interest is solid, unique and completely viable in my eyes.  Having a website totally dedicated to the ‘other leagues’ of Europe is an idea that I have only seen done once on the web, and even then it was on a very small scale.  My idea will cater to all the football fans around the world who want to know what is going on in countries such as Ukraine, Belgium, and Belarus etc… and there are a lot of them.

Other Leagues: Post 6 – Audience Participation

I have chosen this area of interest because there does not seem to be an online community based around the smaller football leagues of Europe.  Therefore, it is hard to precisely figure out the participation rates on things like forums, news websites etc are, because the content that is around is not directly linked to my particular area of interest.

This being the case, I am going to use things like audience numbers for clubs and leagues on the field along with research into the online marketing being done by football clubs to create a general picture of what I feel will be the audience of my unique area of interest.  To supplement this I have also found some football forums who, whilst not specifically talking about ALL the smaller football leagues of Europe, do discuss things on a local (country) scale.

Other Leagues: Post 7 – Timeline

On the 27th September Bayern Munich played Manchester City at the Allianz Arena in Germany in the UEFA Champions League.  A major football controversy occurred in the 55th minute when City’s highest paid player, Carlos Tevez, refused to go onto the field, infuriating his manager Roberto Mancini.

The media storm that followed was quite something.

Other Leagues: Post 5 – Common Content

The most common type of content regarding the other league’s of Europe is without a doubt news articles. They appear on every football media website, with the frequency being the main changing factor. A small amount of websites, such as the sources I have listed in my previous post, are information based, which is what my ‘other leagues’ blog would be about. Other sites might just mention the leagues I concentrate on in passing, or in reference to a club or player playing against or being linked to a larger, more well known club. Without the news article form of content I would find it very difficult to get any information on the obscure football leagues of Europe.

Other Leagues: Post 4 – Who to follow

As my previous blog posts have stated there is not much media that covers the particular niche in the football world that I am planning to cover.  However there are some sites and people, who/that when linked together will provide a competent view of the world of Europe’s other leagues. Following is a list of websites and Twitter handles that I believe provide good information about the other leagues of Europe.

Other Leagues: Post 3 – change of direction

A change of direction.

Area of Interest – post 1

I have decided to change the topic of my assessment blog. Instead of doing the research for my ‘five major leagues of Europe’ blog, my blog will be about the unknown leagues in Europe.  The football competitions I am going to write about include; Polish league, Belgium Pro League, Belarusian league and any other national football league that is not covered in a major way by the media.

At the moment my idea is constrained to the football leagues in Europe, as I believe that worldwide would just be to much for me to research and cover.  My blog would give results and fixtures for all the leagues I decided to cover, interviews with players and teams, editorial articles and just about anything that is football related and not in the mainstream media.

European Football: Post 2 – Summary of information providers

There are so many individuals and media outlets involved in the reporting of football worldwide whether it be results,  theories, controversies or other miscallenous topics it is difficult to narrow it down.  Now with the use of Twitter as a news platform that number has blown out of all proportion with Joe Blow at the pub now able to publish on his phone.

Each country has their own paper/website that is an institution of football news, but unfortunately the language barriers have forced me to look closely at English speaking information providers, whilst only mentioning the foreign language ones.

Spain have the football dedicated Marca, Italy have the national sport newspaper La Gazzetta dello Sport and France get most of their football news from L’Equipe.  The German public read Sport1 and England have a plethora of newspapers to choose from including The Sun, Mirror and football.co.uk.

But these are just media outlets for football information, which is always in high demand.  They all mention the other top leagues in Europe outside of their base country, but, usually, not in any real form of comparison. Goal.com is a website that does a better job in comparing the leagues around Europe because it is an international based website.  You are able to choose which ‘edition’ you read i.e. United Kingdom, Spain, South American and International, and in this way people are able to make their own comparisons.  This website also provides occasional comparisons between the statistics in each league e.g. goals scored, trophies won etc.

Individuals from the above papers and websites provide information usually before they publish it on twitter.  There are also self made information providers such as FourFourTom, Arsenal Column and FrenchFTWeekly (also website), who can be even faster than the major media outlets.  The information that can be conveyed in a tweet doesn’t allow for a lot of detail, but I’ve found that following tweeters such as those above, can enlarge the football knowledge base a persons information is gathered from.

A lot of the actual comparison work is done in sports journals, and is usually done before the start of a new season to see what the changes are, or at the start of a big competition e.g. World Cup, Euro Championships.  I’ve found that self-comparisons can be made from all of the above media outlets and individuals, but for real solid information about the different leagues in one single piece of work, it’s best found in journals.

European Football: Post 1 – Area of Interest

My area of interest for this semester will be the broad subject that is European football.  Even though football was arguably born in Asia, it’s heart, and the best players, are in Europe.

I have restricted myself to writing about the top five leagues in Europe; England, Spain, Italy, Germany and France.  I want to look at the differences between the competitions including styles, stereotypes, players, management and media coverage.  All these areas are by no means the same and are in some cases drastically different.

The football environment in each country is quite unique, but for the sake of convenience and continuity I will focus on the top leagues in each country, which are:

• England – Barclays Premier League (referred to as the ‘Premier League’ or ‘EPL’)
• Spain – Liga BBVA (referred to as ‘La Liga’)
• Italy – Seria A TIM (referred to as ‘Serie A’)
• German – Fußball-Bundesliga (referred to as the ‘Bundesliga’)
• France – Ligue 1 Orange (referred to as ‘Ligue 1’)

One of the major problems I will have to address is the bias my passion for football has developed within me.  Currently I will lean positively towards England and France and away from Italy, but am looking forward to having those preconceptions turned upside down as I look further into the topic.

Academic Blog Advance Broadcast Journalism

This blog is forming part of my assessment for two units at the University of Canberra and thus and I am actually, killing two birds with one stone.  This post is about my involvement in the ‘Twittersphere’  and how the social media world has affected my learning experience in regards to journalism.

Let me start by saying that I was not a huge fan of Twitter when I started this unit.  I found it unnecessary and something that didn’t apply to me.  However, not long into the exercise of using Twitter to report all our journalist thoughts and feelings, I really came to enjoy  and value it’s use. But then… Not long after I had the previous realisation, I had another one. That Twitter is really annoying and only good for casual social stuff and watching football.