Digital Journalism Masters Degree (MLitt)

Program Overview

The Multimedia Journalism degree at this institution equips students with a comprehensive understanding of digital journalism production, ethics, and storytelling techniques. Through a combination of compulsory and elective classes, students develop practical skills in multimedia reporting, interviewing, video editing, and social media strategy. The program emphasizes hands-on experience through projects, simulations, and professional placements, preparing graduates for careers in various media organizations and entrepreneurial ventures.

Program Outline

Outline:

• Compulsory Classes:
• Multimedia Journalism: Introduces professional demands of multimedia journalism, techniques for creating effective digital packages, 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.
• Producing Media: Develops critical understanding of digital journalism production processes by working in a simulated news room, devising, launching, and producing an online publication, creating a social media strategy to market it, gaining direct experience of multimedia news operation through generating ideas, undertaking editorial planning, preparing content, and designing and editing pages.
• Media Ethics: Provides an understanding of key ethical issues in professional journalism, developing skills in recognizing and solving ethical problems, learning about a journalist’s ethical responsibilities to their employer, target audience and the wider community, analyzing and critiquing key debates, applying appropriate ethical concepts, and developing an awareness of the professional choices that journalists face.
• Elective Classes:
• Entrepreneurial Journalism and Innovation: Provides inspiration, mindset and skills for creating new business ventures or preparing for self-managed portfolio careers within the context of the creative industries, covering developing an idea, finding a niche, technological innovation in journalism, freelance careers, and new models of journalism.
• Media & Health: Explores contradictions and consequences of how health is presented in the media, examining entertainment media and its influence on health education, social norms, and stigmatisation, providing understanding of how illness and health are presented by the media, what contributes to such representations, and how that affects public attitudes and behaviors, discovering health myths sold through the media, and becoming more discerning media consumers overall.
• Communicating Science and the Environment: Provides a critical overview of key debates regarding science and environmental communications, focusing on how messages are produced, packaged, and circulated for diverse audiences with examples drawn from legacy media and contemporary social media platforms, examining reporting of the climate emergency, analyzing framing of microplastics in the media, exploring the role of celebrities in shaping environmental campaigns and deconstructing assumptions about what constitutes ‘pollution’.
• Strategic Communication: Acquaints students with the field of strategic communication and major theories of persuasion, exploring the process of communicating purposefully from its different stages, helping form a well-rounded theoretical understanding of its many facets and complexities, and combining theory and practice by asking students to apply acquired theoretical perspectives onto professional scenarios.
• MLitt Dissertation:
• Academic Dissertation: Explores a journalism studies topic at length through robust research methods and analysis, covering journalism ethics, the media’s institutional and financial frameworks, the practice of journalism including textual usage, social media and media effects, and journalism’s social context.
• Production Dissertation: Investigates and produces a piece, or a series of pieces, of original digital journalism at length, creating a substantial multimedia artefact/project of own work that demonstrates high quality journalism skills and technical proficiency, utilizing a range of appropriate story-telling platforms e.g.
online, audio, video, photography, interactivity, captions and graphics in order to effectively interpret chosen subject.

Assessment:

Assessment methods vary according to the nature of the class. Academic subjects are generally assessed by written essays, case studies and presentations. In the Media Ethics class, students complete an innovative assessment, which requires them to work together in groups to research, create and produce a short video that explores a journalism ethics topic. In practical journalism classes, students produce individual multimedia journalism packages, portfolios of their own work and a group online news site. Peer assessment is also used in some of these classes.

Teaching:

The course is delivered by lectures and seminars, during which a range of teaching and learning strategies are used. These include formal talks, discussions, presentations, role-playing exercises and discussion of recorded material. Students also pursue real-life stories, produce their own journalism packages and experiment with entrepreneurial projects in extended workshops. They devise, launch and produce their own online publications predominantly through independent learning.

Careers:

Graduates of the course are employed at organizations such as the Herald and Times Group, the Press and Journal (Aberdeen), BBC, STV, DC Thomson, the Daily Record, and run their own entrepreneurial ventures such as JournoWave. Job roles include magazine journalist, magazine features editor, newspaper journalist, newspaper digital editor, freelance journalist, online journalist, digital copywriter, digital content creator, digital content editor, social media manager, communications officer, public relations officer, and researcher for a broadcast organization.

Other:

• The course offers a great amount of practical learning which is not only very useful for a career, but also an enjoyable way to study.
• Students on the course routinely win nominations and awards in various competitions.
• Students gain professional work experience by undertaking a placement at a newspaper, news agency or broadcast organization, normally for a period of up to four weeks during December/January or March/April.
• Previous students have completed placements at The Herald and Times Group, the BBC, STV, the Independent, various local newspapers, company press offices and NGOs, such as the Scottish Refugee Council.

• MLitt or MSc:
• Full time - £8,700
• Part-time - £4,350
• PgDip:
• Full time - £5,800
• Part-time - £2,900
• International
• £19,600