Journalism & Mass Communication Educator

A survey of 241 full professors in journalism and mass communication were asked their views on doctoral education. Results indicated that the expected number of publications students should generate from their dissertations was positively correlated with the number of publications professors produced from their own dissertations, supporting the notion that mentoring involves passing on the behaviors that professors learned as graduate students themselves. The data also revealed that respondents tended to think of students as “colleagues in training” rather than simply as graduate assistants to help with the professors’ own work. Results also showed that those with a PhD believed a terminal degree was more important for journalism faculty than significant work experience in journalism, which further supports the idea of mentees following in their mentors’ footsteps.

The media sphere has changed significantly as a result of globalization, technology, and new habits of media use. Scholars in journalism and mass communication thus call on a transformation and reinvention of higher education in the field. The purpose of this article is to investigate how media management is taught across different institutions, and how educators cope with this interdisciplinary, international, and dynamic field. In an online-survey, we asked educators from fourteen different countries across Europe about the key themes addressed in teaching, the pedagogies applied, and the fundamental challenges they perceive.

This article presents findings from a pilot study of postgraduate journalism students in Dublin and Amman. The study compared professional outlooks and social characteristics of students in both contexts and examined institutional settings. The study finds that journalism students in Dublin and Amman have very similar views on the profession, although the students in Amman have a somewhat more activist outlook and less of a commitment to neutral or objective reporting; they also appear modestly more interested in effecting political and social change. We believe this has significant implications for journalism education across the region and for cross-cultural exchanges.

Journalism schools are in the midst of sorting through what it means to prepare journalists for a rapidly transitioning field. In this article, we describe an effort to train students in “social justice journalism” at an elite school of journalism. In our ethnographic analysis of its first iteration, we found that this effort failed to turn social justice journalism into a specialized and teachable form of news production. By exploring the assumptions inherent in the program’s first iteration, this article reveals how assumptions that journalism academics and practitioners make about the craft can hurt attempts to teach it.

A survey of 61 master’s degree advertising programs reveals significant trends in program titles, curriculum design, course delivery, and students served. The results provide insight for current and planned master’s degree programs as research predicts a continued increase in demand for master’s education over the next decade. Survey results are compared against overall education trends such as the growth of non-traditional students, increase in online education delivery, and the increase of for-profit universities.