A three-way intersection to The Junction: Publishing opportunity, aspiration and reticence of journalism students at an Australian regional university

Over the last several years, Australian universities have taken part in an initiative where journalism students report and publish on a national publication platform. Instigated in 2014 by Associate Professor Andrew Dodd from the University of Melbourne, the UniPollWatch (UPW) project and its successor, The Junction, are a national and participatory collaboration between Australian journalism schools and programs. The Junction is a national initiative to publish the best student work and ‘to encourage journalism students through collaboration and work integrated learning’ (Dodd and Davies, 2018). It is underpinned by the Journalism Education and Research Association of Australia (JERAA) and is an extension of the 2016 UPW project where approximately 1000 university journalism students from 28 universities reported on the Australian Federal election. The University of Newcastle (UON) is one of the universities taking part in The Junction and it also participated in the UPW initiative. As academics coordinating UPW, we found encouraging, stimulating and maintaining motivation around student involvement to be challenging. Those challenges have helped inform how we have approached encouraging student contributions to The Junction. This paper is reporting on the challenges we found in UPW, the approaches we are taking with The Junction and how we might encourage student involvement in the future.