A new Student Media Association (SMA) has formed from the Student Journalism Conference (StuJoCon), the largest gathering of Australian student journalists to date.\u00a0<\/p>\n
StuJoCon featured an illustrious lineup of speakers, including Kate McClymont, Shankari Chandran, Antony Loewenstein and Nour Haydar. The conference hosted 31 daytime events and four evening events.\u00a0<\/p>\n
At a plenary during the conference, a national association of student media was born as the best approach to addressing the challenges facing Australian student journalism.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The SMA aims to advocate on behalf of student publications, to improve communication and transparency between student media, and to address issues facing specific publications including censorship and budget cuts.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Following the conference, the attendees have been working on a draft constitution. A public consultation process will take place at a later date.<\/p>\n
The interim government includes Imogen Sabey (Honi Soit, NSW) as President, Riley Bampton (Glass, QLD) as General Secretary and five other board members spanning ACT, NSW, Tasmania and Victoria.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The association is expected to begin operations in early December, with elections taking place soon and a new board elected each year. It will be the only union of its kind to represent student journalists.\u00a0<\/p>\n
LaSallian, a Filipino student newspaper who attended the conference, were the only publication with experience of a student media union. The College Editors’ Guild of the Philippines, of which LaSallian is a member, has existed since 1931 and has sought similar goals to the SMA.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Quotes attributable to Imogen Sabey,\u00a0Honi Soit\u00a0editor, StuJoCon Director, and interim SMA President:<\/p>\n
“It is my hope that this association will benefit student journalists for many years to come. Across Australia, student media are facing a myriad of challenges that we are much better-placed to address as a collective. It has been extremely rewarding to see what student journalists can accomplish when we are together, and I hope this association\u00a0will improve the future of the media industry.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A new Student Media Association (SMA) has formed from the Student Journalism Conference (StuJoCon), the largest gathering of Australian student journalists to date.\u00a0 StuJoCon featured […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":27536,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-australia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/seasiaonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/seasiaonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/seasiaonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seasiaonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seasiaonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27534"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/seasiaonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27534\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27535,"href":"https:\/\/seasiaonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27534\/revisions\/27535"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seasiaonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/27536"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/seasiaonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seasiaonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seasiaonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}