COURSE DESCRIPTION
(For reference only)


注:科目簡介只有英文版

JOUR7010 International Relations Theory and Practice

This course aims to investigate the various theoretical and analytical frameworks in the field of international relations. A review of the dominant paradigms in international relations will facilitate a more advanced understanding of the transformation of the global order in the 21st century among students with a journalism background. Topical issues in international news such as terrorism, the implications of 9/11, the U.S. war with Iraq and Chinese foreign relations will also be covered.

JOUR7020 Comparative and International News

This course introduces students to the various forms of national news media systems that have developed at different times and in different locations round the world to enable them to compare and re-assess their own news media. Theories and concepts developed to explain and categorise why news media systems have developed differently will be analysed and studied in the context of comparison of case studies. The course also introduces students to the international news system, and to its connections with national matters and to its changes due to the appearance of the internet in the last 20 years. The meanings and implications of the concept of press freedom will be discussed. There will be an emphasis on the news media systems of East and Southeast Asia.

JOUR7030 Research Methods in Media and Communication

The goal of the course is to:

  1. familiarise students with main types of measurement and collection of evidence in the field of mass communication, particularly journalism;
  2. provide students with a critical framework for evaluating mass media production process and product, communication and communication research conducted by others;
  3. give students first-hand experience in the research process; and 4) sensitise students to the need to answer communication and related questions in a scientific manner either as the producers or the consumers of journalism.

JOUR7040 Multimedia Journalism

The multimedia journalism laboratory course provides introductory hands-on experience reporting and producing news stories through many different digital story telling techniques, including photography, audio, and video. Under supervision, students locate, research, report, edit, and produce multimedia stories of local and international interest. Students will be expected to work both as reporters (i.e. finding and gathering content) and editors (i.e. processing and producing content) on individual assignments and on a group final assignment. All students taking the MAIJ Program are required to participate in this course.

JOUR7060 News and Feature Writing for International Practice

This course will help students apply fundamental newsgathering and writing techniques to real-world reporting. Students will also improve English-language newswriting skills through the analysis of professional news articles and learn to convey information in a concise and engaging style as needed for international journalism. Though a variety of skills will be addressed, this course focuses on feature writing. In addition, students will create and maintain an online professional portfolio appropriate for a journalist.

JOUR7070 Theories of Journalism and Communication

This course examines the theoretical perspectives and practices regarding the performance, role, functions, and effects of journalism and media in modern society, with a specific emphasis on issues in the greater China region.  It aims:

  1. To introduce students to some of the main scholarly ideas about journalism and the mass media asocial institutions.
  2. To assess critically these ideas in relation to their social context.
  3. To examine critically the extent to which these illuminate the production and reception of journalism, particularly in the Greater China region.

JOUR7080 Current Issues and Case Studies in International News

This course is designed to help students appreciate, through topical case studies, the major factors and contemporary trends shaping coverage of international news. It seeks to provide students with a framework for gaining a deeper understanding of the multiple ways media outlets cover international news. Students are expected to take an active role in raising topics of interest and debate issues in class and through written work. The course is designed to allow plenty of flexibility to provide a fast response to breaking news. Some topics may be dropped, others added, to allow a lively debate on the most recent issues in international news.

JOUR7090 International News Translation

This course aims at enhancing the student’s ability in handling information for news purpose in the bilingual context of Hong Kong. Emphasis is put on developing the student’s sensitivity to the difference between the Chinese and English language and awareness of the cultural role of the news translator. Against this background, principles and methods appropriate to a variety of contexts of news translation are introduced. This is an elective course for all Journalism Option students.

JOUR7100 Advanced News Writing and Production for International Practice

This Course covers international beat reporting, feature writing and opinion writing, but the emphasis will be on covering hard news. Students will gather information, find and interview sources for international stories for general news and specialist areas. They will also learn to report and write features for foreign for international audiences and to produce their own opinion pieces. They will be introduced to basic concepts of layout, including type, font and design and learn how to write headlines and caption.

JOUR7110 Reporting International Conflict

This course will examine the work of war reporters in a variety of wars as well as explore the nature of war and the interaction between the experience of warfare and the conventional accounts of it.  It will consider the role of history, mythology and reportage in forming beliefs and expectations about war and peace. Students will encounter a wide variety of theories about international conflict and its relationship to international news and will be encouraged to formulate and express their own positions on the matter.

JOUR7120 International Business and Financial Reporting

This course provides specialist knowledge of business and finance as needed for international news coverage.

JOUR7130 Project or Dissertation

The Project or Dissertation provides the opportunity for students to reflect upon the content of the whole course and produce a piece of work examining in-depth an issue in or of the news that has high relevance to the East and/or Southeast Asian region.

JOUR7140 Globalisation, Economics and Finance

This course is intended to provide students with an overview of globalisation as an issue and a subject for journalism. The origins and extent of globalisation will be explored while its consequences will be investigated. Current issues and debates in this field will be introduced for consideration and class discussion. Students will be expected to develop a critical awareness of the arguments deployed by rival camps and understand the complexity of the globalization in progress, so as to enable them to put business and financial stories in a global context.

JOUR7150 Business News Writing

This course introduces students to different kinds of news stories, sourcing and writing skills. It also aims to integrate students’ knowledge of business, economics and finance with the reporting and writing of business and financial news. It provides students with the skills for reporting and writing international business, economics and finance news. Some specialised styles of writing also will be offered.

JOUR7160 Principles of Economics

This course is designed to provide a theoretical and practical framework that complements JOUR7170 Business and Finance. It equips students with contemporary economic knowledge to interpret and analyze economic issues which are most likely to be useful and interesting to business journalists.

JOUR7170 Business and Finance

The course delivers practical knowledge that will equip journalism students to read and analyze different financial statements, understand the different forms of corporate financing, perform business analysis, evaluate traditional and contemporary investments.

JOUR7180 Advanced Business News Writing and Production

This is a more advanced course than JOUR7150 Business News Writing. The course aims at providing students with the knowledge of the development of global business since the 2nd World War and the role played by giant corporations in economic development. It also will enable students to understand the success secrets of epoch-making companies and provide students with the skills to write in-depth and colourful profile stories of today’s world corporations and their successful leaders as well as business trend stories. They will also learn the art of writing business commentaries and analyses.

JOUR7210 Longform Journalism

This course aims to take students deeper into news gathering and writing by exploring longform journalism, also called literary journalism or narrative non-fiction, with stories longer than 3,000 words. Through examining historical and modern examples, students will understand how digital journalism has impacted longform journalism, analyse compelling longform stories and apply learned techniques to their own work. Students will produce one work of longform journalism to be published digitally at the end of the semester.

JOUR7220 Photojournalism

This advanced photojournalism course provides hands-on experience in covering topical news events and producing news stories through various photographic storytelling techniques, including single photos, portraits, photo essays, and audio slideshows. Students will locate, research, report, edit, and produce photojournalism work and documentary photography stories of local and international interest. Students will be expected to work both as news photographers (i.e. shooting) and editors (i.e. producing) on individual assignments. Students will also study the evolution and concepts of photojournalism, discuss the ethical and moral implications of news photography and critically evaluate photo documentation.

JOUR7230 Broadcast Journalism

This course aims to equip students with the knowledge and skills in newsgathering, writing, reporting, editing and production for international radio and television news. Students will be introduced to the international broadcast news environment. Students will learn the styles, formats and production techniques for covering breaking news and major events and for producing documentaries for an international audience.

JOUR7240 Online and Digital Journalism

This course applies and builds on the skills learned in JOUR7040 Multimedia Journalism to examine and evaluate the impact of the Internet and mobile devices on journalism and the evolution and concepts of online and digital journalism. In addition to learning advanced digital multimedia and content management skills for websites and mobile devices, students will produce and publish their own multimedia projects.

JOUR7250 Reporting China and Hong Kong

This course aims to equip students with the knowledge and skills to cover China and Hong Kong. It focuses on the successes and challenges brought by the political, social and economic reforms undertaken by the country since 1978.  Hong Kong’s role in the nation’s transformation and its evolving relations with the mainland under “one country, two systems” will be explored.

JOUR7260 Reporting Southeast Asia

This course uses both academic and practical approaches to introduce students to the politics, economies, societies, international relations and major issues of Southeast Asia, and to the traditions and current practices of local and international news reporting in the region.

JOUR7270 Entrepreneurial Journalism

The arrival of the internet has opened up the practice of the news to many non-journalistic actors, ending control over journalists’ employment by the traditional mass media – newspapers and broadcasters run by tycoons and governments – and opening up the way for small, independent news businesses. In this changing milieu, journalism entrepreneurship, once represented by the precariously employed freelance minority, is becoming a mainstream career choice. This course aims to understand the changes that have taken place in the economy of the news media as well as to prepare them with advanced knowledge and skills needed to negotiate this new digital media space while upholding journalistic standards and ethics, as well as working in a collaborative environment.

JOUR7280 Big Data Analytics for Media and Communication

This course aims to introduce the fundamental knowledge and hands-on skills of big data analytics in the field of media and communication. Special focus will be placed on techniques for searching, collecting, analyzing, interpreting, and visualizing data. Technical details include, but not limited to, web crawling, data storage, data analysis, text mining, social network analysis, and data visualization, based on open source software packages. Through a variety of teaching learning activities, such as class demonstrations, individual exercises, quizzes, collaborative projects, and guest lectures, by the end of the semester, students are expected to become capable to collect big data from different data sources, i.e., social media harvesting, web scraping, online archiving or indexing data retrieving, with open source software packages. Students are also expected to produce socially, culturally, or commercially meaningful data-driven narrative outputs, such as data-driven journalistic report, data visualization, data-driven business analysis, and computational social science research reports. Meanwhile, critical reflection on the overuse and abuse of big data and relevant ethical and legal controversies will be discussed throughout the semester as well.

JOUR7290 Media Law & Ethics for International Journalism

This course introduces students to the major laws and codes of ethics that affect the practice of international journalism in Hong Kong and abroad. It aims to prepare students to appreciate the rationale behind freedom of speech and the press and navigate legal and ethical pitfalls of reporting international news in the digital age.


JOUR7300 Approaches & Methods in Communication Research

This course is intended to be a lab where students can execute their critical thinking and creative abilities in exploring the fascinating world of mass communication research. While the main purpose is to expose students to the fundamentals of social scientific research methods and to familiarize them with a variety of research techniques in mass communication research that are useful to media professionals (e.g., surveys, experiments, content analyses), students will also be encouraged or required to critically evaluate published research articles and creatively design their own research project.


JOUR7310 Advanced Quantitative Communication Research Methods

Effective communication is data-driven. This course advance students’ knowledge and understanding of quantitative methods for their communication research projects upon graduation. This course will help students develop the research skills through practices in quantitative research design, implementation, analysis, and result reporting and discussion. Students will learn the most commonly used quantitative and computational methods in communication science – content analysis, surveys, experiment, big data analysis – and gain experience with data analyses.

JOUR7320 Communication Research Thesis

This course engages the student in independent research. Under the guidance of the adviser, students generate a research idea, contextualize it within the current literature, collect and analyze research data, and cogently present the work in a well-documented research report. This course allows students the opportunity to apply and integrate their knowledge and skills acquired throughout the MA study to systematically and critically analyze a communication issue. Completion of the course serves a central role in showcasing the student's ability to organize knowledge, structure argument, provide evidence and present results within a single piece of work.

JOUR7330 Food and Culture Reporting

This is an advanced feature writing class that dives deep into the world of food reporting and writing and its intersection with culture. Students will explore different genres of food journalism, including writing a restaurant review, and go into the field to conduct interviews in order to tell the stories of the peoples shaping the food industry in Hong Kong. In order to write about a variety of global cuisines and the cultural traditions behind them, students will also expand their palate and knowledge of the professional world of food through food tastings, research, analyses and reflection on their experiences. The study of longform storytelling techniques will help students apply course material to a final enterprise story on a food issue or trend. This is a class for students who love food, who aren't afraid to try new things and who are interested in going beyond Instagram-style posts to tell compelling and meaningful stories about the people and culture behind the food we eat.

JOUR7340 International News in a Globalized World

The aim of this course is for students to understand how international news developed into its current form, how it is practiced today, the issues affecting it and its role and meaning in international society, politics and economy. Students will study the history of international news and examine the issues shaping it both historically and today. Students will also critically analyze milestone works of international journalism, including how they were reported and consumed by a global audience, to appreciate the diversity of coverage and approaches. Students will stay abreast of developing international news events and will learn reporting methods from professional international journalists, either through guest speakers or in media visits. Students will work in a group to create a creative presentation on a topic related to international news and reflect on international reporting methods in written format.

注:科目簡介只有英文版