I am a journalist, and a scholar of journalism. I work in all media. I am very interested in the intersection of intellectual rigour, social accountability and creative imagination in journalism. To my mind, journalism is always and necessarily an interdisciplinary intellectual engagement, in search of truth to empower publics in pursuit of democratic accountability – social, cultural, economic, ecological, political. As such, it can sit at the cutting edge of knowledge production and therefore the exercise of power in all areas of public life – a very exciting place to be indeed, and a very exciting time to be there.

From 2008 to 2017 I was the founding Professor of Journalism at Monash University. For the previous ten years I had been Director of the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism (ACIJ) at the University of Technology, Sydney. Established in 1991, the ACIJ was disestablished by UTS in 2017. I am a strong proponent of the argument that journalism has to recognise itself as a discipline in the academic context, with all the opportunities and responsibilities that status entails. While journalism is also the object of research in other disciplines – including sociology, communication and cultural studies, politics, history, geography, language studies, art theory, economics, and so on – it must also be the subject or agent of its own activity as a research discipline. This is a complex and controversial issue, which I have addressed at length in my book What is journalism? The art and politics of a rupture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)

I have worked professionally in radio and television at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and as an independent documentary film producer/director. I have won the Walkley Award for Journalism, for the ‘Lynch Affair’ – an investigation of some land deals of the then Federal Treasurer Philip Lynch, which led to his resignation as Treasurer during the 1977 Federal elections. My best-known documentary film Philippines, my Philippines had international television and film festival release, and cinema and television release in Australia. An earlier film, Brigadistas, was shown at film festivals in Australia and Latin America. Both titles are available through the National Film and Sound Archive

I was the Director and Co-Producer with Shirley Alexander at the Institute for Interactive Media and Learning (IML) of the Australia Street Archive, which was a collaborative WWW social documentary between UTS and the Australian Museum about the decoration of domestic space and its meaning. I was the Australian leader of the Tumblong project, a collaborative WWW venture between the IML at UTS and the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford University, working with cultural institutions in both countries. Tumblong involved the collaborative production of art on the Web about the relationship between the two countries by artists working in the UK and Australia, and was financially supported by the Australia Council for the Arts and the Arts Council of England.

I am currently scoping a journalism/media/scholarly project on the experience of, imperatives for and constraints on migration to Australia, historically and in the contemporary context.