Journalism education

8 downloads 1195 Views 138KB Size Report
Journalism education has existed in a more or less constant state of anxiety at ... that this was tantamount to offering MA degrees for swimming. Pulitzer himself.
Journalism Copyright © 2001 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Vol. 2(3): 251–254 [1464-8849(200112)2:3;251–254;019731]

EDITORIAL

Journalism education j

Michael Bromley Cardiff University

j

Howard Tumber City University, London

j

Barbie Zelizer University of Pennsylvania

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,

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com by guest on March 19, 2016

252

Journalism 2(3)

1996). The relationships between these factors require more sustained analysis. For example, it is suggested, on the one hand, that the ‘theory–practice’ dichotomy is deliberately fostered to promote the interests of corporate media capital in the academy (Reese, 1999), while, on the other, the theorization of journalism is seen as a conscious project to occupy otherwise underemployed academics from loosely related disciplines (Bromley, 2000: 372). The issues are likely to reassert themselves as a number of universities realign journalism education with fine art, music, acting, design and animation in schools focused towards the political ideas of the ‘creative industries’ and professional arts. Journalism education, unlike much university activity, is nonexperimental, with its curriculum subjected to overwhelming influence by a limited range of such immediate externally derived conditions (Stephens, 2000). There is some evidence of places in which journalism education has successfully negotiated the academy (measurable research output, increasing student enrolments), and the industry (employment records, graduate satisfaction) – but little of places in which it has satisfied both, outside of some form of shotgun marriage. The academy and the industry employ criteria for assessing success in journalism education which are currently too divergent (Sedorkin, 2000; Stephens, 2000). Furthermore, the issues are most commonly viewed through too narrow a prism, usually a national one. It is important to know to what extent forms of journalism education which are highly contested in the dominant global north and the west are nevertheless being unproblematically exported to the global south and the east, through what mechanisms, and whether it is justifiable to talk of one journalism or many journalisms (Mohsenian-Rad and Entezari, 1994). At stake is perhaps the distinctiveness of journalism itself, and whose paradigmatic assertions will prevail. The majority of critiques note the failure of (western) journalism education to define its own project, let alone have those definitions more widely accepted. The two pieces which are published here – Adam and Skinner et al. – argue in essence for a sustainable journalism epistemology which begins with a determination of what constitutes an education in journalism (as a field) and about journalisms (as practices). This necessitates revisiting the nature of journalism and whether competences in journalism – and understandings of it – are primarily intellectually acquired or selectively developed; or if both are true, how may these qualities be balanced and made complementary and mutually supportive. Thus, the divisions between theory and practice, training and education, vocationalism and the academic, must be regarded at one and the same time as vast, but also as ultimately bridgeable. Journalism may be viewed as constitutive of ‘governance and public life’, as Pulitzer saw it (G. Stuart Adam, this issue: 321) or as ‘an institutional practice

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com by guest on March 19, 2016

Bromley, Tumber and Zelizer Editorial

of representation’ (David Skinner et al., this issue: 342); in both cases, however, when journalism studies intersect with disciplinarity in its various forms, a broader consensus appears to be established, rejecting any reductionist juxtapositioning of vocationalism and critical analysis concentrating on journalism as content to be critiqued (from whatever perspective). More satisfactory ways of seeing journalism (for the most part never terribly arcane) have recently been made even more accessible (see Berkowitz, 1997; Tumber, 1999); yet they are still too rarely encountered in journalism schools. Similarly, too much (canonical) scholarship in journalism offers a limited understanding of news production (Cottle, 2000). G. Stuart Adam and David Skinner et al. address these issues as integral to the authors’ primary concerns with journalism education. Journalism education, journalism as it is practised and journalism studies are not merely incidental to one another. A situation which Pulitzer might have found unimaginable, but which corporate press barons such as himself are accused of engineering – the apparent dilution of journalism’s claim to a distinctive role in the functioning of mass democracy – and the extent to which journalists’ assertions of editorial independence are founded in a paradoxical sense of professionalism, are, or ought to be, central topics in any journalism school. In their respective articles in this issue, David S. Allen and Rosslyn Reed both suggest that confrontations between journalists and others over notions of professionalism, the evidentiary, discourse, status and power are intensifying – and are likely to continue to do so. Perhaps nowhere is this more obvious from a commonsense point of view than in the emergence of news management. Suggesting that the political contingency of the UK’s membership of the European Union has put British journalists under some kind of ‘spotlight’, Neil T. Gavin begins unravelling the complex and shifting relationships in which journalists are involved in processes of news production with others both inside and outside (independent) news organizations. It would be interesting to know how far journalism schools acknowledge that their graduates and protegés are coproducers with ‘spin’ doctors. After two years of publication, Journalism is undergoing a measure of editorial expansion. The main editorial administrative office is to remain in the UK, but is being relocated from Cardiff to London, where Howard Tumber and editorial assistant, Briony Fane, at City University, will receive submissions from Europe and the Middle East. Barbie Zelizer at the University of Pennsylvania will continue to receive manuscripts from the Americas. Michael Bromley is moving to Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, and from February 2002 will receive submissions from Asia (including Australia

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com by guest on March 19, 2016

253

254

Journalism 2(3)

and New Zealand). Contact addresses can be found on the inside back cover of this issue or on the Sage website [www.sagepub.co.uk]. It is hoped that this division of editorial responsibilities will contribute to furthering Journalism’s commitment to publish work which reflects the international and multicultural dimension of scholarship in journalism. We are also pleased to announce that Jean Chalaby (also at City University, London) has assumed the position of Reviews Editor. We would like to thank Kevin Williams, the retiring Reviews Editor, for his valuable contribution over the last two years. He is joining our board of Contributing Editors.

References Becker, L.B. (1996) ‘Training Reporters versus Educating Journalists’, paper presented to Journalism Education, the First Amendment Imperative, and the Changing Media Marketplace, held at Middle Tennessee University: www.mtsu.edu/ ~ masscomm/seig96/ Berkowitz, D. (ed.) (1997) Social Meanings of News: A Text-Reader. London: Sage. Bromley, M. (1997) ‘The End of Journalism? Changes in Workplace Practices in the Press and Broadcasting in the 1990s’, in Michael Bromley and Tom O’Malley (eds) A Journalism Reader, pp. 330–50. London: Routledge. Bromley, M. (2000) Book review, Journalism 1(3): 371–3. Carey, J.W. (1996) ‘Where Journalism Education Went Wrong’, paper presented to Journalism Education, the First Amendment Imperative, and the Changing Media Marketplace, held at Middle Tennessee University: www.mtsu.edu/ ~ masscomm/ seig96/ Cottle. S (2000) ‘New(s) Times: Towards a “Second Wave” of News Ethnography’, European Journal of Communication Research 25(1): 19–41. Hallin, D. (1992) ‘The Passing of the “High Modernism” of American Journalism’, Journal of Communication 42(3): 14–25. Mohsenian-Rad, M. and A. Entezari (1994) ‘Problems of Journalism Education in Iran’, Rasaneh: A Research Quarterly of Mass Media Studies 5(2): summarized at www.netiran.com/Htdocs/Clippings/Social/940000XXSO14.html O’Malley, T. (1997) ‘Labour and the 1947–9 Royal Commission on the Press’, in Michael Bromley and Tom O’Malley (eds) A Journalism Reader, pp. 126–58. London: Routledge. Reese, S.D. (1999) ‘The Progressive Potential of Journalism Education: Recasting the Academic versus Professional Debate’, Harvard International Journal of Press Politics 4(4): 70–94. Sedorkin, G. (2000) ‘Coping in the “Real World” of Newspapers: A Case Study from News Limited’, paper presented to the Journalism Education Association Conference 2000, Journalism Education Futures, University of Queensland, 5–8 December: www.sjc.uq.edu.au/jea Stephens, M. (2000) ‘A J-School Manifesto’, Columbia Journalism Review (September/ October): www.cjr.org/year/00/3/stephens.asp Tumber, H. (ed.) (1999) News – A Reader. London: Oxford University Press. Weaver, P.H. (1994) News and the Culture of Lying. New York: The Free Press.

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com by guest on March 19, 2016