Journalism Dissertation Help?

Hello everyone
Sort of new to the student room so not sure how things work around here so please forgive me for any mistakes/annoyances!

Bascially I'm currently a 3rd year Undergraduate student at Bangor university studying multimedia and journalism

As any third year will know dissertations are looming and its with this I turn to the community of student room for help!

I decided I was going to do my dissertation on digital journalism, with a specific focus on war and terrorism.

My general idea was that I was going to look at and analyse the ways in which terrorism uses digital media, such as online journalism, social networking and blogs. My supervisor has told me that its a little bit 'too open and vague' and that I need to narrow it down to a specific period or incident in time.

I've been sat here throwing ideas around and getting really stressed because Im unsure on what is 'too vague' or 'not specific' enough?
I've had an idea for my question and its as follows

"In relation to two examples of terrorist organisations, Al-Queda and ISIS, compare how the advancements in technology (mainly the internet) and digital journalism has been used for the organisations and what impact this has on western society?"

My friend tells me (who studies the same course) that it still seems a bit too wide and not centred enough? I'm meeting with my supervisor in a few days time and she's expecting me to have done a methodology and literature review on books and journals in order for me to start presenting chapters and yet I still can't help but feel Im getting a bit lost?

Does anyone have any experience on journalism dissertations? Or dissertations based on journalism and terrorism? also, I have found some sources online and in local print but any idea on where to get some nice juicy material?

Once again thanks for reading and I'm sorry if this is a long post, stress levels are at max!
Thanks

Reply 1

AliBonce

Hi braddfarny,

I realise this might be too late, but thought I'd offer some help anyway, just in case you still need it :smile:

I did multimedia journalism BA 2007-2010, and I remember that one of the first things they asked us to do was to decide on one of 3 types of dissertations: qualitative, quantitative, or field-based.

Qualitative looks at the quality of journalism - the study of headlines and the choice of words within in, for example. Is the language choice using scare-tactics? Is this good journalism?

Quantitative looks at data - over one month, how many news reports did the Telegraph write about ISIS? Or how many times did the Mail Online publish images of Kate Middleton? What does this say about journalism today?

Field-based involves going out into the work place and seeing things for yourself. Perhaps get a month of work experience at Sky, for example, and then write about the dynamics of a newsroom team and how they work together.

I think once you decide which style of dissertation you want to do, you can then see how that will work with your chosen topic.

Your topic sounds very interesting, but I agree with your friend that it's too wide open. Your questions needs to have an end goal.

Best of luck!!

Alice

Journalism Dissertation Help?

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