The academization of journalism is reliant on the development of the field founded in scholarship demonstrated through the publication of research in peer-reviewed specialist journals. Given the profile of journalism faculty, this means inducting practitioners into a culture of critical research. In Australia at least, this cohort of neophytes is predominantly comprised of middle-aged women who were surveyed about their personal attitudes to research. They were mostly open to the idea of becoming researchers but were inclined to proceed cautiously without necessarily severing their ties with practice. There was evidence to suggest that a generally positive orientation to research was not capitalized on and that they remained uncertain about the role of research. On the other hand, they appeared not to have adopted the orthodoxy of implacable opposition to scholarly inquiry. The change in gender composition in the academy may provide, contrary to historical, but more in line with contemporary, evidence, a renewed impetus to the project of academizing the field.
Journalism education has existed in a more or less constant state of anxiety at least since the establishment of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism led a New York newspaper editor to observe (no doubt apocryphally) that this was tantamount to offering MA degrees for swimming. Pulitzer himself had occasional misgivings about the fitness of journalism as a subject of university study (Weaver, 1994: 58-62), and it might be argued that for most of the past century only the intensity of both external criticism and introspection has varied. At the same time, a shift which occurred initially towards the kind of tentative quasi-state intervention exemplified by the inclination of the Royal Commission on the Press in the 1940s to prescribe education and training for journalists in the UK (Bromley, 1997: 333; O'Malley, 1997: 149-55) was subsequently overtaken by a reverse tendency to greater degrees of self-examination, notably following the decline of what Hallin (1992) called the 'high modernism' of American journalism. Within the last decade in particular, journalism education seems to have become far more reflexive.To some extent this has arisen as a consequence of the responses of higher education institutions to fluctuations in the contexts in which they find themselves -most evidently, the 'reforms' of the 1990s imposed in Australia and the UK, and the de-sovietization of central and eastern Europe. Simultaneously, it has become almost axiomatic that processes of digitalization, allied to globalization and corporatization, present fundamental challenges to journalism. Largely internal debates around where journalism's 'natural home' (Carey, 1996) lies in the academy continue to proliferate with the humanities, liberal arts, social sciences, communications, other professionals, business, information specialists and discrete professional schools often projected as a zero-sum game of either 'training reporters' or 'educating journalists' (Becker,
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