Journalism education

Abstract

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,

Journalism and Academic Writing

“…As a discipline, journalism has received a chilly welcome from academe, with the oft-told anecdote that offering a Master’s degree in journalism was at first described as akin to offering an MA in swimming (Bromley, Tumber & Zelizer, 2001). Mark Deuze (2006, p. 21) cites Raudsepp’s 1989 comment that journalism education is ‘unloved by the industry and tolerated, barely, by the academy’.…”

A socially-responsible educational response to routine-biased technological change in journalism Fostering employability among journalists in the United Kingdom

“…40 Representing the expectations of, on the one hand, the academy and, on the other hand, the mass media industries, they required divergent masteries, and were measured differently. 41 For media institutions, the primary requirement was the attainment of 'entry-level skills' -hence the location of journalism education in the US, Australia and elsewhere primarily at undergraduate level. 42 The provision of university journalism programmes in the UK initially (and for two decades, exclusively) at PGT level but as diplomas, not Master's degrees, was predicated on them being conversion courses specifically designed for initial employment and offering an intensive version of an undergraduate programme.…”

Defeated profession, illegitimate discipline: it is time to understand the journalistic field´s institutionalization

“…Journalism Education shows that the fissures in this area are more general than its isolated manifestations, discussed in the various national contexts (MEDSGER, 1996;REESE, 1999;TURNER, 2000;ADAM, 2001;BROMLEY et al, 2001;SKINNER et al, 2001;SCHADE, 2006;PIETLÄ, 2008). As part of the process of the globalization of culture, in which the internationalization of science plays a vanguard role (ORTIZ, 1994), it is improbable that the accepted construction needed for the epistemological maturing of the field will find local solutions to the question never solved of the oneness and diversity in the Communication discipline.…”