Caroline Graham

Dear Rachelle: The Hunt For My Sister’s Killer investigates the cold case murder of Rachelle Childs, whose body was found in beachside scrub in New South Wales, Australia, in 2001. In this conversational review, journalists and academics Caroline Graham and Kylie Stevenson reflect on the ways true crime podcasts have become a 'medium of last resort' for cold cases and the ethical complexities this creates for reporters. Through the lens of Dear Rachelle and their own podcast reporting practice, they discuss the subjective position of a true crime podcast reporter, intimacy in podcast reporting practice, the changing and sometimes blurred relationships between journalists and police in longform true crime and ethical challenges in structuring longform audio documentary.

'All by myself': Professional, emotional

In this chapter, the authors interrogate their experience “slipping” through the mirror of objectivity during four years undertaking research for a true-crime podcast and book. Using frameworks from critical auto- and duoethnography to create a layered, “messy” text (Ronai 1995), the authors integrate vignettes related to their experience of true crime reporting with critical perspectives, research, and other writers’ self-reflexive accounts. This chapter layers and tangles the intimacies of the practice of true crime reporting. It interrogates issues of proximity, subjectivity, and ethics in true crime writing through a gendered lens, from both inside and outside the research and writing/production process. It focuses on a range of competing practical and theoretical proximities that have ethical implications for true crime reporting: the proximities of place, form, time, audience, source, gender, and story.

Review of: Entertainment, Journalism, and Advocacy: Competing Motivations in the True Crime Podcast Ecosystem, Lindsey A. Sherrill (2023) Blue Ridge Summit, PA: Lexington Books, 230 pp., ISBN 978-1-66690-601-1, h/bk, USD 100.00 ISBN 978-1-66690-602-8, e-book, USD 45.00

This research seeks a clearer understanding of listener perspectives on issues of ethics in true crime podcasts (TCPs). To do so, the study first divides TCPs into three subgenres: Documentary, Recap and Expert. Then, it uses a mixed methods content analysis of listener reviews (n = 1200) of TCPs to ascertain listeners’ value systems and preferences when assessing podcasts, the role of ethics in audience evaluations of TCPs and the impact of subgenre on listener response. It finds that a large subsection of the reviewer audience (29.7 per cent) privileged ethics as a key criterion for evaluating and reviewing podcasts and that listeners’ level of engagement with issues of ethics is specific, careful and nuanced. It also finds that subgenre can play a role in shaping engagement with content, with Documentary and Recap formats more likely to result in listeners relating to content as entertainment.

This commentary considers the changing nature of feature writing within the contexts of: multimedia tools, the online publishing landscape, shrinking newsrooms, changing revenue models, freelance markets, audience and story analytics and journalism education.

As a case study, this article will illustrate how a project-based approach has addressed some of the challenges of embedding data journalism content into courses at a small Australian university. It will also identify some of the associated limitations and difficulties. Since 2013, Bond journalism students have undertaken five collaborative data-driven investigations, with a sixth underway in 2018. The project-based approach encourages resilience, creative problem-solving and minimizes students’ aversion to maths and statistics while empowering students to produce industry-standard work in an area of inexperience and discomfort. However, it is a reasonably resource-intensive approach and would be difficult to replicate in a larger cohort.

Worldwide, journalism students—under the supervision of lecturers, and backed by the resources of universities—have begun to distinguish themselves as important creators of public interest reporting. The industry shift towards collaborative, multi-directional news-gathering processes places these students, as networked journalists, in a favoured position within emerging information spaces. However, despite widespread interest within the industry and academe in the roles non-traditional participants can play in creating media content, literature outlining the frameworks and processes for networked journalism initiatives is scarce. Using a data-driven political investigation by Bond University students as a case study, this article contributes to the creation of such frameworks. The ‘Order in the House’ project (published by Crikey in June 2013 ) mined publicly available Australian parliamentary records to assess 150 politicians’ engagement and efficiency in the lead-up to a federal election. This article outlines the scope and limitations of the project, and the research design, teaching techniques and technology used to facilitate data collection and presentation.

The objective of this article is to assess the readability of leaflets about urological procedures provided by the British Association of Urological Surgeons (BAUS) to evaluate their suitability for providing information. Information leaflets were assessed using three measures of readability: Flesch Reading Ease, Flesch-Kincaid and Simple Measure of Gobbledygook (SMOG) grade formulae. The scores were compared with national literacy statistics. Relatively good readability was demonstrated using the Flesch Reading Ease (53.4–60.1) and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level (6.5–7.6) methods. However, the average SMOG index (14.0–15.0) for each category suggests that the majority of the leaflets are written above the reading level of an 18-year-old. Using national literacy statistics, at least 43% of the population will have significant difficultly understanding the majority of these leaflets. The results suggest that comprehension of the leaflets provided by the BAUS is likely to be poor. These leaflets may be used as an adjunct to discussion but it is essential to ensure that all the information necessary to make an informed decision has been conveyed in a way that can be understood by the patient.