Welcome to the Principles of Journalism and the News Media course offered by the Journalism and Media Studies Centre at the University of Hong Kong.
On this website we will post all course-related materials including news articles, academic papers and videos that will be discussed in the lectures and tutorials. As such, all students of this class will be expected to check this website frequently, which can be done either by subscribing to the RSS feed or by signing up for email alerts.
This course is open for all HKU students, not just journalism major and minor students. In fact, the basic concepts that will be covered this semester are mainly for news audience.
We will try to build your understanding of the importance of news and reliable information as a news consumer, while discussing the basic principles that underpin journalism.
We will then explore the different types of news reporting from old-fashioned print journalism to the brave and exciting new world of social media, paying particular attention to the economic, social and cultural challenges created by the shift from traditional publication channels to new media.
This is not a journalism skills course, but you will be introduced to basic reporting and writing techniques.
Now a little bit about myself. My name is Masato Kajimoto. I came to Hong Kong in 2001 and worked as an online reporter and ‘specials editor’ (a sort of like a web producer) at CNN before taking up a career in teaching and research. Although I was working for a U.S. news media outlet, I am Japanese. I was born and raised in Nagoya, Japan, and I have written news articles, features and columns both in English and Japanese.
My specialized area in journalism is web/online journalism. I was one of the early birds to get a master’s degree in broadcast and “new media” journalism back in 2000 at the University of Missouri-Columbia. And ever since then I have been very excited and passionate about the new forms of news presentations and narratives we find on the internet. Continue reading »