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Dr Akhteruz Zaman

Lecturer, Journalism

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Biography

Akhteruz Zaman joined the Monash journalism team in February 2010. He teaches in Journalism Studies. Before joining Monash, Zaman taught communications and journalism for six years at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS).

Originally from Bangladesh, Zaman started his journalism career in mid-1980s with a news magazine job in the capital Dhaka. He then went on to work in a news agency and the country’s public service television station. His news career spanned about fifteen years and included both reporting and editing positions. Zaman wrote long pieces including cover stories for the news magazine, worked in the national and international desks of the news agency and television newsrooms, was assigned to the political beat to cover Bangladesh’s national politics and parliament and engagements of the country’s prime minister, both at home and abroad, produced local and national news bulletins and current affairs programs for television, and coordinated daily international satellite news exchanges. He also worked briefly in the government information service.

Zaman did his undergraduate degree in journalism from the University of Dhaka (Bangladesh) and postgraduate degrees from the University of South Australia (Master of Arts) and the University of Sydney (Master of Philosophy). He is currently finishing his Doctor of Philosophy dissertation at UTS; his PhD thesis explores the relationship between journalism and space by examining the physical newsroom of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Sydney television service.

The combination of professional career experience with in-depth study and research in journalism, along with the cross-cultural experience of working and study in Australia and Bangladesh, gives Zaman’s work a rich and fertile breadth. 

His research interest involves questions related to the practice of journalism: its core definitional aspects as well as its more contemporary changes and challenges. Recent theoretical interests in the study of journalism, such as the perspectives of practice and field theories and a need for adopting more global outlook overcoming the prevalent Western limitations inspire his research. He studied television news workers in the ABC’s Sydney newsrooms (Gore Hill & Ultimo), the reporting of the 2003 war in Iraq in South Asian newspapers, and the growing presence of journalists as ‘sources’ in television news content. More recently, Zaman contributed to a research on the reporting of river issues in newspapers from Bangladesh.

Publications

Refereed Journal Articles

  • Zaman, A. 2004, ‘Global Diffusion with Local Dimension: A Study of Iraq War News in South Asia’, Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy, no. 113, November, pp. 87-97.
  • Zaman, A. 2004, ‘Sharing News Space: Journalists as Sources’, Australian Journalism Review, vol. 26, no. 1, July, pp. 191-200.
  • Das, J., Bacon, W. & Zaman, A. 2009, ‘Covering the environmental issues and global warming in Delta land: A study of three newspapers’, Pacific Journalism Review, vol. 15, no. 2, October, pp. 10-33.

Conferences

  • Zaman, A. 2006, ‘A Spatial Examination of Journalism’, paper presented at an international conference titled “Thinking Journalism across National Boundaries: New Challenges and Emergent Perspectives,” Porto Alegre (Brazil), 3-5 November, jointly organised by the ICA, IAMCR, Journalism Studies and the Brazilian Society of Researchers in Journalism (his paper was judged as one of the best papers).

Media

  • Zaman, A. 2007, ‘Bangladesher Sangbadikotay Juddho-Sangbad’ (war coverage in the journalism of Bangladesh), Nirikkha (monthly magazine, Press Institute of Bangladesh), issue 155, February, pp. 35-46.