Pushback journalism: Twitter, user engagement and journalism students' responses to 'The Australian'

Abstract

This article examines journalism students' responses to claims in 'The Australian', made in October 2014, alleging some of Australia's top universities were indoctrinating rather than educating future journalists. It reports the findings of a case study of user engagement with the story, including social media network and sentiment analysis of the resulting Twitter conversation. We found evidence of what we term "pushback journalism", a new type of user engagement by younger people. Journalism students and other interested users converged to "rewrite" the indoctrination story - using wit, irony and humour as well as argument - with the aim of setting the record straight from their perspectives. In contrast to Australian social media research on adversarial relationships between professional and amateur journalists, we argue "pushback journalism" provides evidence of contiguous but critical relationships between the current generation of professional journalists and upcoming journalists-in-training, based on different if overlapping ideas about, and experiences of, journalism education, media careers and the future of news.