MA Radio

This module seeks to encourage the students to experiment and explore the medium of radio while utilising the substantial developments in digital technology in recent years. The students are expected to learn creative sound production techniques, the principles of story-telling and be able to decide the appropriate genre and method for creative expression for their programmes.

This module seeks to train and educate the student up to a baseline standard for entry into professional radio journalism environments. This involves focusing on the basic skills of journalism: research, story origination, news gathering, interviewing, writing, presentation, bulletin editing, news programme editing, and managing the allocation of news resources. The module focuses on radio journalism techniques that are specific and cultural to the radio/sound medium. 

The module investigates the nature of media law and ethical regulation for media practitioners primarily in the UK, but with some comparison with the situation in the USA and references to the experiences of media communicators in other countries. The students are directed towards an analysis of media law as it exists, the ethical debates concerning what the law ought to be, and the historical development of legal and regulatory controls of communication. It is a lively and dynamic subject which is approached with critical balance and informed by multi-disciplinary subject areas such as the law rather than the post-Marxist predictability of cultural and media studies. For example, if a society has abolished criminal libel, how can it justify having a criminal liability for breach of privacy? As tabloid journalists up to editor level, and their sources, have been prosecuted in the UK for engaging in techniques of information gathering, the module asks about the implications for democracy and media freedom rather than solely focusing on the concept of retribution for the cult of ‘media victims.’ Who defines and determines the power co-efficient of ‘public interest?’ Is the concept of privacy a convenient ideological construct to protect powerful elite interests or a justifiable human right to protect vulnerable persons? What role should the journalist and media publishers have in justifying their power through the conception of being a public servant to their audience? The theoretical underpinning involves a module of learning the subject of media jurisprudence - the study of the philosophy of media law, media ethicology - the study of the knowledge of ethics in media communication, and media ethicism, the belief systems of media communicators.

The module evaluates media law and regulation in terms of its social and cultural context. The seminars involve a combination of discussion of the lecture topic followed by viewing a film/documentary programme/extract, or the constitution of a moot court whereby the students take adversarial roles in teams of attorneys/lawyers to address a fictional scenario related to each lecture topic of the module. The students also take turns to constitute a three-judge panel to decide the cause. The fictional ‘trials’ give the students an active opportunity to research, argue and determine legal and ethical issues that are deemed problematical. The module delivers considerable practical knowledge of how to navigate media law and apply it to multi-media publication.

This module is a practical course in writing audio/radio drama by adaptation, dramatisation, and original dramatic writing based on an idea that could be documentary, life experience or other artistic inspiration.

The module explores the common aspects of sound narrative in different practice media and critically investigates to an advanced standard how audio-genic techniques transfer intertextually between radio, prose, theatre, and film.

This module offers an introduction to practical research methodologies and their deployment in various different specialist journalism fields. The module evolves a critical approach to the many different sources journalists use, the compromises involved and constraints within which they work.

Subjects to be covered can change according to outside events and the availability of professional speakers, but are expected include sourcing and using data, the use of the Freedom of Information Act, investigative journalism, economic and political journalism, the problems and pitfalls of reporting conflict, managing human, particularly vulnerable, human sources.

This module explores the cultural history and practice of radio. The modules attempt to take an international approach to the cultural history and contemporary practice of radio drama, journalism, documentary, music programming and radio journalism. The overall aim is to investigate how radio broadcasting institutions and the content of their programmes served the imagination of their host cultures and societies.

The course is built around a structure of key concepts: Radio media language, Radio representation, Radio audience, Radio Ideology, Radio Institution, Radio Narrative and Radio genre.