Mass Communication — AEJMC Hot Topics

80% of J&MC Programs Make Changes to Reflect Media Landscape

August 22, 2012 By AEJMC 2 Comments

For Immediate Release | August 22, 2012
ASJMC Press Release (PDF version)

Journalism and mass communication programs are making sweeping changes to their curricula and putting new models in place for training the next generation of American journalists.

Results from the Annual Survey of Journalism & Mass Communication Enrollments indicate that nearly 80 percent of all U.S. university programs in journalism and mass communication have made changes to their curricula in the last two years to reflect changes in the communication landscape.

Among the digital skills more than three-quarters of the programs reported teaching are:

96% writing for the web
95% using the web in reporting
94% using social media
92% using video on the web
92% using still photos on the web
90% creating and using blogs
89% using audio on the web
88% web layout and design
88% editing for the web
88% using the web in public relations
87% using graphics on the web
82% digital storytelling
77% using slide shows on the web

In addition, just under half of programs reported teaching management skills for online or web publishing (46%) and teaching entrepreneurial “start-up” skills (44%).

“A recent ‘Open Letter to University Presidents’ from leading foundations that support journalism and mass communication education underscores the importance that our programs must place on continuously moving the culture and the curriculum forward to reflect and anticipate the changing media environment,” said Peggy Kuhr, president-elect of the Association of Schools of Journalism and Mass Communication and dean of the School of Journalism at the University of Montana. “Often these changes occur in subtle ways, and sometimes with greater fanfare. What’s important about the results of this survey is the consistency of the message: Our programs have made change, and I know we’ll see even more in the future, particularly in the areas of mobile technology and entrepreneurship.”

“The Open Letter raises issues that have been important to the accrediting process for several years now,” said Peter Bhatia, president of the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications and editor of The Oregonian newspaper in Portland, Ore. “As this survey shows, many, many programs are embracing the necessary and ongoing curricular change required to prepare students for the digital world. They should be applauded and encouraged to keep pushing ahead and to be doing so in a timely and continuing fashion.”

More than half of the programs responding to the survey reported having hired new full-time faculty members with digital media skills (55%). Three-quarters of the programs said they had hired adjunct faculty with digital media skills (77%). Nearly seven in 10 (68%) of those responding said they had sent faculty members to digital media training programs, while a quarter (26%) said they were now using digital media skills as a criterion for promotion of faculty members.

“These results indicate that journalism and mass communication programs are well aware of the imperative for our curricula to change so that our students can continue to be prepared to enter the media industries or go on to graduate study,” said Beth E. Barnes, president of ASJMC and director of the School of Journalism and Telecommunications at the University of Kentucky. “Even as programs continue to face budget challenges, they are finding ways to enhance current faculty members’ digital skills and bring in outside expertise to provide their students with access to current practice.”

The survey of administrators at 491 programs offering coursework in journalism and mass communication was conducted between October 2011 and July 2012 and asked about curricular offerings and enrollments during the 2010-11 and 2011-12 academic years.

The survey identified 487 programs offering bachelor’s degrees related to journalism and mass communication, 222 with master’s degree programs and 50 with doctoral programs. In Fall 2011, these programs enrolled 203,561 students in undergraduate programs, 13,392 in master’s programs and 1,789 in doctoral programs.

Not all of the administrators answered the questions on program offerings. Responses were weighted to reflect the full population of programs.

The Annual Survey of Journalism & Mass Communication Enrollments is conducted every year in the James M. Cox Jr. Center for International Mass Communication Training and Research, a unit of the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia.

Dr. Lee B. Becker, director of the Cox Center, also directs the enrollment survey project.

All programs listed in either the Journalism & Mass Communication Directory, published by the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, or The Journalist’s Road to Success: A Career Guide, published online by the Dow Jones News Fund, Inc., are included in the survey.

For further information:
Dr. Beth E. Barnes, bbarnes@uky.edu
Professor and Director, School of Journalism and Telecommunications
Associate Dean for Undergraduate and International Programs, College of Communication and Information
University of Kentucky

Dr. Lee B. Becker, lbbecker@uga.edu
Professor and Director, James M. Cox Jr. Center for International Mass Communication Training and Research
Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication
University of Georgia

————–

The Association of Schools of Journalism and Mass Communication promotes excellence in journalism and mass communication education. A valuable resource for chairs, deans and directors, ASJMC is a non-profit, educational association composed of some 190 JMC programs at the college level.

Filed Under: Hot Topics Tagged With: ASJMC, Education, higher education, Journalism, Mass Communication

Book Review – Refiguring Mass Communication: A History

October 26, 2011 By AEJMC Leave a Comment

Refiguring Mass Communication: A History. Peter Simonson. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press “History of Communications” series, 2010. 261 pp.

This is a rhetorical and historical study into what the term “mass communication” has meant since (and even well before) the term first appeared nearly a century ago.

A member of the University of Colorado communication faculty who began his academic work in religious studies and then turned to intellectual history, Peter Simonson organizes his argument around narrative accounts of five key figures and their own communicative worlds—three of them predating the modern conceptions of mass communication. Indeed, he redefines the very concept by using these significant but overlooked rhetorical episodes in its history. As he puts it in the introduction, his is a study of changes in “mass communication as a social concept, a rhetorical utterance, and a heterogeneous family of social forms.” [Read more...]

Filed Under: Reviews Tagged With: aejmc quarterly, history book reviews, Mass Communication, Peter Simonson, quarterly autumn 2011

Book Review – Refiguring Mass Communication: A History

May 20, 2011 By AEJMC Leave a Comment

Refiguring Mass Communication: A History. Peter Simonson (2010). Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. pp. 261.

Journalism teachers are naturally intrigued by the relationship between periods in history, which logically follows the evolution of economics, technology, and sociological developments. What author Peter Simonson does in his Refiguring Mass Communication: A History suggests that not only do these relationships transcend those traditional avenues, but he also reclaims the strength, potential, and promise of both the practical and aesthetic purposes of mass communication.

And he does it by telling great stories and showing connections between them.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Educator Winter 2010, Reviews Tagged With: aejmc educator, History, Mass Communication, Peter Simonson

Spotlight on: Journalist’s Resource Website

March 23, 2011 By AEJMC Leave a Comment

The Journalist’s Resource website is a project by the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education. The site describes itself as:

Journalist’s Resource is designed to promote knowledge-based reporting. The site provides access to scholarly reports and papers on a wide range of topics. Journalist’s Resource provides the user with a brief Overview of each study, Teaching Notes and links to other relevant material.

They have an instructor’s guide section on the site that helps educators use the site, with information on how the information is organized, how it can be used and also a list of journalistic problems.

You can view the site here >>

Filed Under: News Tagged With: Future of..., Journalism, Mass Communication, resources

Freelancers Needed More Than Ever – How Schools Can Prepare Them

March 22, 2011 By AEJMC 1 Comment

“Journalism as a whole — and media as a whole — are moving to a growing reliance on freelancers.” That quote came from Rob Steiner, director of the journalism lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, earlier this month on “The Agenda” (a Canadian public affairs show).

Steiner says that journalism employers – and media in general – are looking to knowledgeable freelancers for content as opposed to full-time general assignment reporters. He mentions that colleges and universities need to recognize the idea of the entrepreneurial journalist and the fact that students graduating from J-schools will need to market themselves in their specific area of expertise.

Do you agree with Steiner that J-schools need to change how they’re preparing future journalists? Do you think there is even a shift at all towards more freelance reporting?

Filed Under: News Tagged With: freelance, Future of..., Journalism, Mass Communication, Traditional Media

HDTV and its implications for mass communications

July 12, 2010 By AEJMC Leave a Comment

By Todd Chambers, Texas Tech University | Media Management and Economics

Wow. Have you heard the news? Television is making a comeback! From viewers spending more time in front of their new HDTVs (Stelter, 2010) to double-digit increases in spot television advertising revenues (Elliott, 2010), it appears that the good ole’ days are back. Despite these positive indicators for an important cog in the media wheel, significant challenges remain for an industry struggling to stay relevant to younger media consumers. It’s within these challenges where new theoretical and applied research studies can inform the next generation of media management and economics teachers and scholars.

In addition to the implications of policy and regulatory issues, the adoption of digital television by the industry and the consumer has provided numerous opportunities to think through some of the research opportunities in management and economics. Just on the consumption side, media managers are constantly trying to justify ‘new’ strategies for new ‘revenue streams’ from an active audience that is using multiple media concurrently. From applied studies related to managing multiple media platforms to theoretical studies about competition in local television markets, the digital era provides unique prospects for scholarship. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Features Tagged With: AEJMC, Federal Communications Commission, HDTV, Mass Communication, Media Management and Economics, National Association of Broadcasters, National Cable & Telecommunications Association, Texas Tech University, Todd Chambers

Bringing back the written word: 24 hours on the iPad

July 7, 2010 By AEJMC Leave a Comment

By Robert Gutsche Jr. and David Schwartz

It seemed impossible.

How could we go 24 hours without touching our laptops? Could we use our smart phones only for making and answering calls? Could we really live off of an iPad for all we do?

Those were the goals, anyway – to see how much we could do over 24 hours without any other device. Just the iPad.

So, for two days last week, the two of us, both journalism educators, avid news-users and news men, attempted to use Apple’s iPad for all of our electronic communications needs.

It worked – kind of.

These, then, are the major points from our iPad experience, and our thoughts on what it could do for journalism and journalism education. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Features Tagged With: Apple, Communication Technology, David Schwartz, iPad, Mass Communication, Multimedia, Print, Robert Gutsche Jr., Traditional Media

The Future of Communication: Theory and Methodology?

July 7, 2010 By AEJMC Leave a Comment

By Dietram A. Scheufele, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Communication as a discipline has come to a crossroads. The “mass” in mass communication has morphed into different publics that generate, exchange, and use content in ways that were unimaginable just a decade ago. And these changes in how content is produced and communicated are paralleled by much more far-reaching shifts in how some cohorts in society interpret traditional notions of privacy, objectivity, and source credibility. And so far, our discipline has not done a very good job at offering answers to what have become increasingly pressing questions in various societal debates. How do social media change how we interact with one another? How does information get disseminated in a fragmented multi-channel media environment? And what does the future of (mass) communication look like?

The tricky part, of course, is that many of the answers to these questions transcend the boundaries of our discipline. This is particularly challenging for a young field, such as communication, that continues to struggle with its identity and its desire to compete on an even playing field with much larger disciplines, such as psychology and political science. And if we are not careful, we may follow these disciplines down some dead ends. A good example is the debate surrounding Republican Senator Tom Coburn’s proposal in October 2009 to prohibit the National Science Foundation from “wasting any federal research funding on political science projects.” Coburn, of course, used the label “political science” but targeted social science much more broadly. And his comments rekindled an old debate among political scientists about incremental disciplinary research versus big questions. Cornell’s Peter Katzenstein summarized this intra-disciplinary dilemma best: “Graduate students discussing their field … often speak in terms of ‘an interesting puzzle,’ a small intellectual conundrum… that tests the ingenuity of the solver, rather than the large, sloppy and unmanageable problems that occur in real life.” [Read more...]

Filed Under: Features Tagged With: Communication Theory and Methodology, Dietram A. Scheufele, Future of..., Mass Communication