Mark Balnaves

My professional background is in journalism and public relations.  My first job in media was as a news production assistant with Channel 7 in Canberra, not long after Kerry Stokes bought the station.

My career started in the early 1980s as a news production assistant and journalist in print and television, in Canberra and northern Victoria. I worked in public relations when I moved to Melbourne  where I became passionately interested in how modern telecommunications were developing, including the work of Trevor Barr, Peter White and John Burke at the Commission for the Future.

I am still a practising journalist using my international press credentials while in Kuwait.

I am currently Professor of Mass Communication at the Gulf University of Science and Technology and teach in introductory communication and media courses and media management.

I have brought in over AUD$2.7 million in competitive grants over my academic career and successfully created programs in communication at Murdoch University, University of Queensland and Edith Cowan University.

As an academic I have taught at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. My areas of teaching include:

  • Integrated Marketing Communication,
  • Communication and media research methodology,
  • Digital media and journalism,
  • Media audiences and public relations – strategic communication (theory and practice).

I have published over 80 refereed papers, including book chapters, with leading journals and publishers in the field including Penguin, Sage, Bloomsbury Academic and Palgrave MacMillan. Books include Mobilising the Audience (2002), Media Theories and Approaches: A Global Perspective (2008), A New Theory of Information and the Internet: Public Sphere Meets Protocol (2011) and Rating the Audience: The Business of Media (2011). In 2011 I was invited as a ‘World Thinker’ to the annual Festival of Thinkers in the United Arab Emirates to debate and discuss media issues. 

I can demonstrate a significant contribution to my programs and to university over the years and sustained performance in teaching at undergraduate and postgraduate level. I have actively linked teaching, research and industry to university by: 

  • encouraging business and community support for postgraduate scholarships,
  • involving undergraduate students in industry and community supported projects which have professional, academic and vocational relevance;
  • obtaining financial support from local industry for research and for teaching;
  • establishing financially successful Masters programs that have an industry, government, community and international focus.

My latest work has been in analysis of the creative industries in the Hunter, New South Wales, Australia, with Associate Professor Phillip McIntyre and colleagues at University of Newcastle, ARC LP 130100348 $180,000 Creativity and Cultural Production in the Hunter: an applied ethnographic study of new entrepreneurial systems in the creative industries, and a cultural history of popular music in Western Australia.  I was also involved in a successful bid for City Evolutions, a major project with Newcastle City Council, projecting the history of Watt Street, Newcastle’s first street, in various ways.          

I am a member of the Communication and Media Research (CAMR) research group at University of Newcastle, headed by Associate Professor Phillip McIntyre.  This group brings together scholars from a range of communication and media areas, practice and theoretical.