Interview with Jim Macnamara, Professor of Public Communication
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HSS: Back to your career - you're the recipient of numerous awards, including 'Communicator of the Year' by PRWeek Asia in 2002 - what exactly do you have to do to be Communicator of the Year?
Jim: Actually it wasn't an award I applied for - PRWeek Asia was the sponsor of a series of communication awards and they also established an overall award for 'Communicator of the Year'. It was a great shock. The award was announced in Hong Kong at a dinner and I wasn't there.
Jim relaxing at an office function with colleague
Mike Watson, an UTS Master of Arts
(Communication Management) graduate.
I received a phone call at about 2am in Sydney with a couple of people shouting excitedly 'you've won Communicator of the Year'.
HSS: And as someone in public communication, do you think your style of communicating has changed over the last 20 years?
Jim: I believe I've changed enormously - and I think this is something I can bring to the job at UTS. I started out as a journalist and as a journalist, you have a certain perception of your role - you believe you're seeking out truth and information and you go out and enthusiastically do that. You tend to not have much knowledge of what people do with your messages, other than that you assume they read them.
There's a view among journalists that you presents the facts and let the public decide. When you make the transition from journalism to public communication, you then change your perspective because you then care about what people do, you're actually in the business of persuasion. I felt, and a lot of people still feel that when you come from journalism into public communication you are well-qualified. In fact, I found I was not well-qualified because I knew how to shape messages but I had no idea how those messages were interpreted by audiences or what audiences did with those messages. So one of the challenges in the public communication sector is to develop skills in presenting messages, but it's actually the way audiences receive and process and interpret and gain meaning from those messages that is a big part of our job. Obviously if no-one takes any meaning out of advertising or public relations then it isn't effective.
And that's an area where universities have got a key role because we have to educate our public communicators in areas such as media effects and audience reception theory which are not specifically taught to journalists and not even in some of the public relations courses.
So I've learned over the years that you've really got to understand a lot more about psychology, sociology, politics, audiences, semiotics and areas like that ... It's a much more inter-disciplinary process and I think it's very important to produce communicators who have that broad understanding.
Jim Macnamara began his role as Professor of Public Communications part-time on August 6 2008 and will become full-time from January 2008.