Journalism & Mass Communication Educator

The purpose of this study is to understand how effectively sports journalism programs and internship experiences are preparing graduates for careers in local TV sportscasting. This study also examines how local sports broadcasters are adjusting to the profession. Results demonstrate the value of a sports journalism education and sports media internship when graduates are attempting to land their first jobs in a local television sports department. However, despite the value shown, many local sports broadcasters, while enjoying it, are still having a difficult time in their first few years on the job.

Concerns about “fake news,” misinformation, and disinformation have led to increasingly urgent calls for News Literacy (NL) education interventions and assessments of their effectiveness. New technologies create ongoing changes in the ways people consume news, which means that NL education assessments must be continuously updated and adapted to address current trends. The purpose of this study was to augment existing NL assessments to incorporate recent aspects of hard news consumption in digital news environments by testing two new scales: the Headline Literacy Scale and the Hard News Standards Knowledge Scale. The results demonstrated both scales were reliable and valid.

In this study, 23 African American broadcast journalists, who graduated from college between 1994 and 2014, were interviewed about their experiences working in network television news, specifically the role their mentor played to help their professional success. Mentors largely provided both vocational and psychosocial support, but were overwhelmingly not seen as role models. The majority of mentees also believed race was a factor in their careers. The findings led to recommendations on how mentors can guide their mentees toward career progression, such as verbal encouragement, guiding mentees to position themselves so “Others” see the value they bring to the newsroom, and networking opportunities.

Previous research demonstrated the importance of a healthy instructional environment characterized by institutional support and positivity for student learning. Furthermore, classroom climate is impacted by the qualities of the students and the other individuals in the classroom. Accordingly, the goal of this article was to investigate the independent and collective influence of instructor and student confirmation (i.e., communication of value and significance), classroom connectedness (i.e., perceptions of support and cooperation), and self-efficacy (i.e., beliefs about personal capabilities) on student learning. Three hundred and fifty-five students provided responses to measures of instructor confirmation, student confirmation, classroom connectedness, self-efficacy, and learning. Results indicated that classroom connectedness mediated the associations between instructor and student confirmation, and learning. In addition, self-efficacy moderated the association between classroom connectedness and learning.

Large variations in mobile users, mobile devices, and course content make generalizations about mobile learning difficult. Prior to the international pandemic that forced more virtual and mobile instruction, this exploratory study measured how students in one journalism and one English composition course at two universities responded to completing writing assignments using only their phones. Although pre and post differences in student attitudes and engagement between the writing courses were insignificant, further analyses of age differences (freshman vs seniors) revealed significant variance. These results suggest only a 3-year time span could determine how much students embrace mobile assignments.

Journalism and mass communication faculty in Central Asian countries face increased institution and government pressure to produce research that appears in Scopus-indexed publications. This study interviews faculty members in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan to examine how they attempt to meet these publication requirements. The findings suggest a disturbing research environment where some faculty resort to unethical means, such as buying and selling research co-authorship or paying to publish in predatory and fake journals.

It is vital that critical media literacy be integrated in media programs’ skills courses. For students to become well-rounded and inclusive media makers, educators need to help students gain critical media literacy skills when producing content. This can be done through understanding and using film theory, which demonstrates to educators how canonized visual language is systemically discriminatory. The use of contemporary film theories helps students learn to subvert the canonized language, resulting in positive representations of all communities. With convergence of conceptual topics related to race, gender, and sexuality, educators and students can work together to produce equitable media.