Biography

Professor R. Warwick Blood

Warwick Blood’s research interests are: Socio-cultural risk theory; Media representations & analyses; News framing analyses; Reception theory, especially in health contexts; and Agenda-setting research.

He is currently a co-chief investigator on a National Health & Medical Research Council, Capacity Building Grant in Public Health (2009-13) ‘The Australian Health News Research Collaboration’ with Professor Simon Chapman (Univ. of Sydney) and Professor Jane Pirkis (Univ. of Melbourne). Dr Kate Holland is the postdoctoral researcher at UC.

In 2008-10 he worked as a chief investigator on an ARC Grant led by Professor Paul Komesaroff (Monash Univ.) investigating socio-cultural aspects of obesity and overweight.

In 2008, he completed with colleagues at The University of Melbourne a major research consultancy on Australian news coverage of suicide and mental illness during 2006-2007 for the Commonwealth Department of Health and Ageing. The project was a follow-up to a similar study completed in 2001. This research program informs the Commonwealth government’s resource for media professionals, Reporting Suicide and Mental Illness. He also contributed to revising the World Health Organisation’s guidelines on news reporting of suicide.  He has completed research consultancies for beyondblue, the National Depression Initiative, Carers Australia, Australian National Council on Drugs, and the Defence Science Technology Organisation. In 2003-06, he was the chief investigator on an ARC grant examining suicide and mental illness news (with Professor Jane Pirkis, Univ. Melbourne) and Professor Graham Martin (Univ. Queensland).

From 1989 to 2003, he was UC’s Head of the School of Professional Communication. Previously, he taught at Charles Sturt University, where he was Foundation Head of the School of Communication, at Ohio State University’s School of Journalism, and at Macquarie University in the Mass Communication program.

During the 1970s he was a reporter, senior reporter and executive producer for Radio Current Affairs, ABC.  He was a New York Correspondent for the ABC in the mid 1970s.

He is a past president of the Australian and New Zealand Communication Association, and former Editor, Australian Journalism Review.  He is currently on the editorial boards of the Chinese Journal of Communication and the Australian Journal of Communication and is a regular referee for national and international journals. He is a member of the International Communication Association, the International Association for Communication and Media Research, and the Australian and New Zealand Communication.

Currently at the University of Canberra he supervises honours and postgraduate

students and convenes the undergraduate units: Communication and Media Research,

and Risk, Crisis and Communication.

Selected Recent Publications

McCombs, M., Ghanem, S., Lennon, F.R., Blood, R.W., Chen, Y-N (2011). International applications of agenda-setting theory’s Acapulco typology (pp. 383-394). In E. Bucy & L. Holbert (Eds.) The Sourcebook for political communication research. London: Routledge.

Holland, K., Blood, R.W., Thomas, S., Lewis, S., Komesaroff, P & Castle, D. (2011) ‘Our girth is plain to see’: An analysis of newspaper coverage of Australia’s Future ‘Fat Bomb’. Health, Risk & Society 13(1): 31-46

Tulloch, J & Blood, R.W. (2010). Iconic photojournalism and absent images: Democratization and memories of terror (pp. 507-519). In S. Allan (Ed.) The Routledge companion to news and journalism. London: Routledge.

Pirkis, J., Blood, R.W., Skehan, J. & Dare, A. (2010). Suicide in the news: informing strategies to improve the reporting of suicide. Health Communication, 25(6): 576-577.

Ducat, L., Thomas, S., Blood, R.W. (2009). Sensationalising sex offenders and sexual recidivism: Impact of the Serious Sex Offender Monitoring Act 2005 on media reportage. Australian Psychologist 44(3): 156-165.

Pirkis, J., Blood, R.W., Dare, A. & Holland, K. (2009). Changes in media reporting if suicide in Australian news media between 2000/01 and 2006/07. Crisis, 30(1), 25-33.

Dare, A., Blood, R.W., Pirkis, J. (2008). Risk and responsibility: a qualitative analysis of newspaper coverage of the deaths by suicide of two Melbourne girls pp. 207-239). In A. Herberth, T. Niederkrotenthaler, B. Till (Eds.) Suicidality in the media. Wien, Lit Verlag.


Contact Information
 

Back