From Campus to Newsroom in the South Pacific 245 Fijian Studies Vol. 2 No. 2 © Fiji Institute of Applied Studies. From Campus to Newsroom in the South Pacific: Gover- nance and the Quest for a Professional Journalism Ethos David Robie Shailendra Singh Abstract Educated and well-informed journalists provide a key underpinning of good governance. The University of the South Pacific's Regional Journalism Programme began producing double major graduate journalists for the South Pacific from 1996. Two-thirds of the gra- duates live and work in Fiji. While some news media organisations in Fiji have generally recruited graduates, others have preferred to hire untrained school leavers. Increasingly, parallel with draft legis- lation designed to turn the self-regulating Fiji Media Council into a statutory body, there have been public calls for higher media stan- dards and more professional training and education. This paper ex- plores the career attitudes and destination of the university's 68 journalism graduates between 1996 and 2002 based on empirical data from a six-year monitoring project that started in 1998. It also examines the policies of the Fiji media industry towards graduates and education. Introduction The high level of tertiary qualifications and education of journal- ists in countries such as Australia, France, New Zealand and the Unit- ed States (all which have had considerable influence on the region's media) has fuelled a debate in recent years about the quality of jour- nalists in the Pacific and their education. Fiji Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase, for example, is among several politicians who have derided Pacific journalists as 'uncertain interviewers, poor verbal communica- tors [and who] have problems with accuracy' (Qarase, 2001). This