MDIA5001 Writing for Media

How MDIA5001 is assessed

These three weights are the figures the University publishes for this course and they add to exactly 100, so nothing else carries marks. The published record carries no hurdle statement, which is why no component here shows a hurdle badge. What the assignment briefs add, outside the marking rubric, is a set of conditions that override a good mark: a news article submitted without the signed consent form for an interview, or without the press release link or full text at the end of the story, is capped at a Pass; an editorial submitted without its reference list is capped at a Pass; and any assignment whose declaration form was not lodged as its own separate submission is recorded as zero, as is work with fabricated citations or a file the marker cannot open.

What MDIA5001 covers

MDIA5001 builds reporting craft first and then tests it in three registers. Weeks 1 to 3 establish what media writing is, what makes something hard news, and how sources are found, weighed and verified, which is the material the 40 percent news article draws on. Week 4 turns to digital writing, scanning behaviour and search, Week 5 to opinion and editorial form.

After the flex week, Weeks 7 and 8 cover adaptation across platforms and audience centred, accessible writing, which together carry the 30 percent multiplatform package. Weeks 9 and 10 close on professional ethics, the national codes and the rules governing artificial intelligence in assessed journalism, which the editorial and every declaration form are graded against.

It is a production course rather than a theory course: you write publishable media copy through the term and you are graded on three finished pieces of work.

The teaching arc runs from what media writing is and how journalism sits alongside public relations and branded content, through hard news and news values, sources and verification, interviewing and consent, digital and search aware writing, opinion and editorial craft, adaptation across platforms, audience centred and inclusive writing, professional ethics, and finally writing in the age of artificial intelligence.

Week 6 is a flex week with no classes, which is why the lecture decks are numbered one behind the teaching week from Week 7 onwards.

Assessment is a 700 word news article worth 40 percent, built either from one of the eleven listed press releases or from two interviews you conduct yourself; a multiplatform package worth 30 percent, made of three to five social assets or one video of 60 to 90 seconds adapted from a single published news story; and a 700 word editorial or opinion column worth 30 percent comparing a current issue across at least two countries or regions.

The three weights add to 100. What decides grades here is rarely knowledge.

It is craft plus compliance: the briefs carry conditions that sit outside the marking rubric altogether, so a piece that scores well on every rubric row can still be capped at a Pass when a signed consent form, a press release link or a reference list is missing, and a piece whose separate artificial intelligence declaration was never submitted is recorded as zero.

This guide teaches the craft the rubric rewards, and puts the conditions that override the rubric where you can see them.

Worked example · free

Turning a media release into the top of a news article

Key terms

Inverted pyramid

The news structure that puts the most important facts first and the least important last, so a reader who stops after one paragraph still has the story and a subeditor can cut from the bottom without losing anything essential.

Lead

The opening sentence or two of a news article, carrying who, what, when, where and why with attribution built in. The course sets a band of 25 to 40 words for it in the news article.

Nut graf

The paragraph after the lead that states why the story matters now, supplying context, significance and background before the body starts adding detail.

Attribution

Naming the source of a fact, figure or quote inside the copy itself, by person, title and organisation. It is what separates a reported claim from an asserted one, and it is scored on its own rubric row.

Primary source

Original, first hand material created at the time of the events: an eyewitness, a direct interview, an original record, raw footage or a participant's own post.

Secondary source

Material that analyses, interprets or summarises primary sources after the fact, such as other news reports, press releases, expert commentary and think tank background.

Verification

The editorial technique of confirming that collected information is accurate, carried out before publication and judged on the process followed rather than on a verdict issued.

Fact checking

The application of verification to specific claims, statements or narratives, usually after they have been published, ending in a judgement that the claim is true, false or misleading.

Platform affordance

What a platform's technical and design features make easy or hard to do, which is what determines whether a piece of content works natively there or reads as a repost.

Branded content

Content produced or funded by a brand, covering advertiser funded programmes, advertorials, native advertising, custom publishing and product placement, and the reason disclosure matters at the boundary with journalism.

Information disorder

The umbrella term for false or misleading information in circulation, split by falseness and intent to harm into misinformation, disinformation and malinformation.

MDIA5001 FAQ

Questions students ask in each MDIA5001 chapter

Why does a journalism course spend its first week on public relations?

Because most of the raw material you will handle in this course arrives from a communications office, including the eleven press release publishers the first assignment names. A release is not neutral information. It is a document engineered so that a busy reporter can lift a headline, a set of facts and a quote straight out of it, which is efficient for the newsroom and extremely convenient for the issuer. Knowing the anatomy of that document, where the 5W1H sits, where the friendly quote sits, what is deliberately absent, is what lets you use it as a starting point rather than reprinting it. The rubric for the first assignment rewards exactly this: the top band asks for contextual data, independent verification or research beyond the provided material, and the failing band describes an article that copies the provided material. Reading public relations well is therefore a reporting skill. Chapter 01 · Media writing today: journalism, PR and branded content

How recent does my story have to be?

For the news article the guidance is that the release should be recent, typically within the past few months, and the course adds a useful qualifier: an older subject stays reportable if the news peg is new. A statistical series that has run for a decade becomes a story the day a fresh quarter lands, and a programme that has existed for years becomes a story when a change to it takes effect. For the opinion piece the currency test tightens: within the past six months and ideally within the past few months, with subjects that were significant five years ago explicitly ruled out. The practical consequence is that you should choose your news peg first and your topic second. A writer who picks the topic first almost always ends up arguing that it is still relevant, which is a weaker position than simply pointing at something that happened this month. Chapter 02 · Hard news, newsworthiness and the public interest

Is a press release a primary or a secondary source?

Secondary, and treating it as primary is the most common conceptual error in the first assignment. A release is written after the events it describes, by an organisation with an interest in how they are understood, and it summarises and frames material that exists elsewhere. That does not make it useless. It is a legitimate secondary source and the assignment is built on one. It does mean the six rules for handling secondary material apply in full: attribute it properly, verify what you can independently, weigh the credibility and interests of whoever wrote it, be transparent about where your information came from, and add reporting or an angle so that what you produce is not aggregation. The one primary element inside most releases is the direct quotation, which is a first hand statement by a named person and can be used verbatim provided you attribute it by person, title and organisation. Chapter 03 · Sources, verification and fact checking

Do I really need a signed consent form, and what happens if I do not have one?

For the news article, if you take the interview pathway, yes, and the consequence is the sharpest in the course: an article submitted without a signed participant consent form for an interview you conducted is capped at a Pass, no matter how the rubric rows score. The form has to be signed before the interview, not collected afterwards, because that is what makes the consent informed. The instrument the course supplies also covers things students forget to raise: that the material is for an academic assignment, that it may be submitted for publication, that the interviewee has seen the quotes attributed to them and confirms they are accurate, that they will be told if it is published, and that they keep a signed copy. Build the form into your process as the thing you do before you press record, and the cap becomes impossible to trigger. Chapter 04 · Interviewing: preparation, conduct and consent

How strict is the 700 word limit?

The target is 700 and the workable range is roughly 650 to 750, which is about ten percent either way. The tolerance is not permission to ignore length, because one of the rubric criteria explicitly scores adherence to guidelines including word limits, and its top band describes work that strictly follows them. The more useful way to think about it is that the brief publishes a budget part by part, and hitting the parts almost guarantees hitting the total: a headline of 10 to 15 words, a lead of 25 to 40, a body of 400 to 460, context of 100 to 120 and a conclusion of 50 to 80. Write to those bands as you draft rather than writing long and cutting at the end, because cutting at the end tends to remove context and attribution, which are the two things the rubric is watching. Chapter 05 · The news article: inverted pyramid, lead and attribution

Is search optimisation the same as writing clickbait?

No, and the course frames the difference usefully: a search query is a question, and an optimised page is a page that answers it in the words it was asked in. Clickbait withholds the answer to force a click. Search optimisation supplies the answer in the terms the reader used to ask, which is why the technique is mostly about specificity rather than about excitement. The concrete moves are all unglamorous: use the full name and the place instead of a pronoun or a pun; put the searchable words at the front; make each subheading intelligible on its own; treat captions as mini headlines because they rank independently; and choose links carefully because search engines weigh the quality of what you link to. None of that asks you to overstate anything. If your search optimised headline promises more than the article delivers, the problem is not optimisation, it is accuracy, and the rubric scores accuracy. Chapter 06 · Writing for digital media: SEO, social and search

How personal is this piece allowed to be?

You are writing as an individual columnist, so the first person is permitted, but the course and the rubric both push toward argument rather than autobiography. The expected style is analytical but opinionated, confident and rhetorical, with the first person used sparingly, and the tone formally persuasive without becoming academically dry. The useful test is whether a sentence in the first person is doing evidential work. 'I spoke to three riders' earns its place because it reports something. 'I feel strongly that' does not, because it replaces evidence with assertion and the assertion adds nothing a reader can weigh. Personal experience works best as one of the six narrative techniques the course teaches, a short vignette that humanises a statistic, rather than as the ground of the argument itself. Chapter 07 · Opinion, editorials, reviews and persuasive voice

What does platform adaptation mean, in a way a marker can see?

It means each asset was built for the way its platform is used, and the visible evidence is that the assets differ in more than shape. A carousel can build an argument slide by slide because it is swipeable, so slide one carries a single strong statistic, the middle slides carry one fact each, and the last slide carries the call to action. A short video has to land its hook within the first seconds and be legible with the sound off, so it needs on screen text as structure rather than decoration. A thread is headline driven and rewards a fresh angle rather than the headline again. A professional network post leads on the policy or industry consequence. What a marker sees when adaptation is fake is uniformity: the same sentence in five boxes, one register everywhere, and a caption that narrates the image. Those three are the named mistakes and they are visible in seconds. Chapter 08 · Writing for multimedia platforms

Why does a writing course spend a week on audiences rather than on sentences?

Because the sentences are downstream of the audience decision. The concept of the imagined audience makes the point directly: the model of the reader that a writer carries decides what gets covered, how it is framed, which words are used, what knowledge is assumed and how long the sentences run. Change the model and the prose changes with it. There is also an assessment reason. Two of the three assignments are marked partly on audience: the multiplatform rubric has a criterion for platform adaptation and audience targeting, and the news article rubric rewards work that a general reader can enter without prior knowledge. The week gives you the vocabulary to make those decisions deliberately rather than defaulting to whoever you unconsciously imagine, which the research says is usually someone quite like the writer. Chapter 09 · Audience centred and engaging writing

Do I need to know all eight national codes?

You do not need them memorised, and the course does not test recall of clauses. What the material is set up to teach is comparison, which is a transferable skill and, not coincidentally, the exact move the opinion assignment requires. Read two codes closely rather than eight superficially, ideally the Australian one and one from a jurisdiction with a different media system, and notice two things: which principles appear in both, and how differently they are enforced. Principles converge across borders far more than enforcement does, and that gap between shared values and unequal enforcement is fertile ground for a comparative argument. The tutorial exercise of rewriting five clauses in your own words is the best preparation, because paraphrasing a clause is the fastest way to discover whether you understood it. Chapter 10 · Ethics and accountability in media writing

If I declare that I used a tool to write, am I covered?

No, and this is the most consequential misunderstanding in the course. Four uses are prohibited even when declared: generated paragraphs submitted as final work, generated news reports or features, generated quotes or invented sources, and rewriting an entire draft. Declaring them does not license them; it documents them. The course has been explicit that a student who declares having used a tool for writing has described a breach rather than complied with a policy. The permitted zone is genuinely useful and genuinely narrow: help thinking before you report, help organising what you gathered, and a light language pass at the very end. Everything that produces sentences for the submission sits on the other side of the line. Chapter 11 · Writing in the age of artificial intelligence

How to prepare for the assessments

Work backwards from the three briefs, because in this course the brief is the syllabus. Print all three, and beside each rubric criterion write the one sentence of evidence in your own draft that satisfies it. Any row where you cannot point at a sentence is a row you are guessing on.

Second, build the compliance checklist once and reuse it: consent form signed before the interview, press release link at the foot of the story, reference list on the editorial, declaration lodged as its own separate submission, file merged into one document and opened again after export to confirm it is readable.

Those five lines protect more marks than any amount of redrafting, because each of them can override a good rubric score on its own. Third, write to the published structural budgets part by part rather than writing long and cutting: a lead of 25 to 40 words and a context block of 100 to 120 are far easier to hit on the way in than on the way out, and the adherence row of the rubric scores it.

Fourth, collect a comparison habit. Every rubric here rewards material you were not given, so keep a running note of official statistical releases, regulators and policy documents in two countries for whatever issue you are following; the editorial needs a second jurisdiction and the news article needs one external figure, and both are painful to assemble the night before. Fifth, rehearse the register switch deliberately.

Take one story you already know and write it three ways in an hour: as a straight news lead, as a carousel plan, and as an opinion thesis. The course is really one skill tested three times, and that hour will tell you which of the three registers you default to and which one you have to build.

Your AI Arts tutor for MDIA5001

Stuck on a hard MDIA5001 question? Sia is AskSia’s AI Arts and Humanities tutor — ask any MDIA5001 Writing for Media question and get a clear, step-by-step explanation grounded in how the course is actually taught and assessed. Read this whole study guide free, then take your hardest questions to Sia.