Media and Communication

As the media and communication industries continue to grow there will be many opportunities to find a career within them.

The world of media and communications is fast-moving and fascinating. Take social media, for example, where companies are using and selling personal data and world leaders are sharing their views on foreign policy. On this course you’ll get right under the skin of media and communications, and you’ll be able to choose areas of study that most interest you. From publishing, advertising and branding to social media and creative digital production, you’ll gain a solid skills set that will give you the confidence to forge a career in this exciting industry.

Module Showreel - Year 1, 2 & 3

Media & Comms and PR

Year 3 MultiMedia Practice

Media & Comms and PR

Year 2 Publishing Practices

Media & Comms and PR

Web and App Module Showcase

Programme Showcase

In this short video made by the university, year 3 Media and Communication students talk about what it is like to be at student at Canterbury Christ Church University. The video is focussed around the year 3 Advertising Practices module.

Multimedia Journalism

Experienced professionals will teach you how to generate journalism across TV, radio, newspapers, magazines and online.

Television Newsday

Our Newsdays give Multimedia Journalism students a taste of working in a real newsroom by simulating the different roles and responsibilities that they will face as a professional. By Year 3 the students are adept at a wide range of skills, including news writing, producing, shooting video, recording voice-overs and editing – all to a tight deadline. Working in real time, the group puts together an actual television news show each day and students take turns to perform the different newsroom roles. The day starts with the diary meeting to discuss the different stories reporters will be pursuing and culminates in a show presented by two students in our dedicated TV studio on campus. The end product is truly as close to the real thing as you could possibly get, and our students leave university knowing they could not be better prepared to hit the ground running in a real newsroom.

The redesigned Year 3 Online Newsdays

In their final year MMJ students face the ultimate challenge: working together as a real reporting team in a real newsroom. This year this assessment posed a particular challenge, both for students for also for staff. Whereas the set of online newsdays usually take place on campus, lecturer Graham Jones had to redesign the assessment in line with the social distancing restrictions.

“The week of online newsdays was supposed to be the students’ big finale to the course. I was determined that the coronavirus situation wouldn’t deny them of that but, instead, we would use the situation to our advantage and give them the stage to showcase the skills they had learned over the past three years,” Jones said.

With support from colleagues Jamie Stephens and Alex Gardiner, the students stepped up to the challenge and surprised themselves with a truly impressive array of stories – from hard news to lighter lifestyle pieces and investigations – all produced from their own homes.

The stories were published on a public website www.thecanterburyhub.co.uk which showcased all the skills they’ve picked up over the last three years.

By the end of the week The Canterbury Hub had attracted 6400 unique users and 7400 page views. This is a testament to the professionalism of our student journalists and the standard of the work that they produced over the week.

The feedback from the students was incredibly positive, garnering Jones a Golden Apple teaching award for Best Emergency Assessment Planning.

In particular, the students felt empowered by the experience and prepared for facing a challenging job market and working environment after graduating.

The adapted newsdays not only gave the students a chance to complete their final practical assessment for the year, but in actual fact prepared them for exactly the kind of working environment they will face as journalists in the real world. They leave the programme knowing they are more adaptable than they even realised to make it in a very tough media landscape. Speaking after the assessment, Jones said he always knew the success of the Newsdays hinged completely on the students buying in completely. “Designing virtual newsdays was challenging for me as a lecturer and a big ask of them as students journalists at a time when seasoned professional journalists were grappling with their new way of working. However, they rose to the challenge and will always remember the experience and the quality of the work they produced as a fitting way to end the course,” he said. Visit www.thecanterburyhub.co.uk to see more about The Canterbury Hub.

“I think the newsdays were so successful, I truly felt like a working journalist in the industry. The encouragement we have had by our lecturers evidently gave us the confidence and belief that we could do the newsdays remotely, something that I feel would be a challenge to real working journalists let alone students. It has filled me with confidence as the amount of content and stories we were able to find and produce from the limitations of our own houses and in such a short time period was impressive. It has shown the use of social media and how helpful it is as a story source and how vital it is to being a working journalist in terms of building contacts too.”

“I feel even more encouraged to embark on a career in journalism, as the remote newsdays showed how flexible the profession can be.”