Enrolment of first year students in journalism leaps up by 30% in 1979. Why?
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"Possibly because the Information scandal has made journalism seem like a glamorous profession." At least this is the opinion of Journalism staff who compare the jump in numbers with a similar phenomenon at journalism schools in the United States after Watergate.
Of course, the increase may also be linked to the growing reputation of the Rhodes department, the only one of its kind at an English-language university in South Africa.
Bulletin, 1979 (2): 3
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(Flashback)
Student in 70s : Bob Stimson, a distinguished BBC foreign correspondent was a great, if unconventional, teacher. One reporting course ended with Bob plying students with liquor at Settlers' Inn so they could learn to function under real-life conditions. It seems to have helped. The department grew rapidly, and by the end of the second year, the department had 100 students taking journalism as a major.
Student in 80s: Gavin Stewart lecturing a newswriting course based on episodes of Rescue 911 (convenient lecture material). He had excellent attendance at the dawn patrol lectures on Friday morning.
Generation of journalism students in the 70s will remember Peter Temple trying to teach us sub-editing. Avoid abstractions like "situation" he admonished. And then put us deep into one: It was an exam where we were somehow supposed to figure out that the name Sluts was supposed to be corrected to Smuts. Temple did, however, teach us that if you tilted a picture of Richard Nixon off the vertical, the extra-elongated nose made the man appear even more sleazy