The Pacific Media Centre—Te Amokura—which publishes Pacific Journalism Review has always been concerned to link ‘robust and informed journalism’ with media research that contributes to social development both in the broader community, the media industries and inside the academy. The new section Frontline aims to further this by addressing more directly the interface between professional or practice-based journalism and scholarly journalism research practices. This commentary reflects new directions in academic journalism. It is worth charting some of the developments that have brought us to this point.

More than thirty universities within the Pacific region are now teaching journalism. Across the sector, there are now hundreds of journalism academics and thousands of students. While students are undergraduates, others are postgraduates who may already have practised as journalists. Considered collectively, this is a large editorial resource which can be partly be deployed in producing journalism in the public interest, including investigative journalism. But while students can play a part, academic journalist involvement is crucial. This article discusses the role that universities can play in building and maintaining investigative journalism in our region. It suggests that global approaches can provide part of the intellectual underpinnings of investigative journalism in universities and explores possibilities for collaborative investigation across time and space and how these might connect to broader innovations in the field of journalism.

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This paper argues that those who see no place for media theory in journalism education have adopted an intellectual approach to journalism which is both inappropriate in a university context and serves neither journalism nor audiences well. Rather, the interaction between the professional practice of journalism and theory and research into journalism can be a close and dynamic one in which research can produce innovative journalism and the professional practice of journalism and experiences of audiences can feed into a research agenda. Links between journalism research and journalism professional practice can be found in journalism about journalism and in the everyday talk of journalists and audiences. Three case studies which have arisen during recent experience in teaching journalism at the University of Technology, Sydney are used to demonstrate these points.

This article explores the coverage of environmental issues in the daily newspapers of Bangladesh, a South-Asian country facing the onslaught of global warming because of its low-lying deltaic plains and overpopulation. The results are based on an examination of the content of environmental coverage in three national daily newspapers (two Bangla and one English-language) during June 2007. Drawing on field theory and analytical frames from journalism studies, this study examines the principles of journalistic practices as revealed by the content of these publications. The findings indicate that environmental journalism is a strong subfield in Bangladesh’s media, which constructs its own veracity in ways that reflect the social, economic and political contexts of each publication. Based on this small study, the authors conclude that environmental journalists in Bangladesh adopt approaches to sourcing and causation which enable them, in alliance with non-government organisations, to pursue their aim of actively intervening in the field of government policy of Bangladesh, both in international and local spheres.