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JOS04
JournalismStudents Across the Globe: Professionalization, Identity and Challenges in a Changing Environment
F. Hanusch
1
1
Queensland University of Technology, Digital Media Research Centre, Kelvin Grove, Australia
This panel will provide a comprehensive analysis of journalism education around the world as seen through the eyes of journalism students, therefore shed‑
ding important light on ways in which future journalists are moulded. This is important, because our understanding of journalism education is still incom‑
plete, despite that a university journalism education is increasingly a dominant pathway into the profession in many countries. This boom in the popularity
of journalism education, which has been described as a‘graduatization of journalism’(Splichal and Sparks, 1994: 114), has been a result of various attempts
at professionalizing journalism around the world. One motivation has largely been that by educating journalists at university it would lead to increased
public standing as an academic discipline, while at the same time news organizations have appreciated this kind of outsourcing of journalistic training at
a time of increased budget pressures, despite an uneasy relationship between them and the academy. Despite the fact so many journalists of the future are
now educated at universities, we still know relatively little about the ways in which journalism education influences students’perceptions of and attitudes
to their future profession.Yet, this is important because arguably these students would take many of the views formed during their education into their pro‑
fessional work in the future, despite the likelihood that once in newsrooms, these views are likely to evolve further. Increasingly, scholars are engaging more
closely with the question of what happens to journalism students at university, but there have been few large cross-national attempts which might improve
our understanding from a global perspective that would be appreciate of the influence of individual, institutional and also broader political, economic, social
and cultural factors. As a result, the study “Journalism Students Across the Globe: Professionalization, Identity and Challenges in a Changing Environment”
was born. It brings together scholars from 30 countries around the world and is a unique attempt to capture the views of journalism students in a large
variety of political, economic, social and cultural contexts. This panel will present preliminary results from this major collaborative research project. Based
on surveys with representative samples of students in each country, the study enquires into journalism students’motivations for studying journalism, their
views of the most important traits for journalists to have, their role perceptions, ethical views, their views of media performance in their country, as well as
their views of a variety of challenges for the media. In addition, the project gathers a large amount of information about students’ personal backgrounds
and views, as well as the tertiary journalism education landscape in each participating country. This panel focuses on presenting first results by engaging
with key themes in the literature on journalism education. Following an introduction to the project and an overview of countries who participated and
demographic profiles of the students surveyed, the panelists present findings on journalism students’motivations for studying journalism, their emerging
role perceptions, ethical views and their views of the news industry.
PN 004
Comparing Journalism Education: An Overview of “Journalism Students Across the Globe”
F. Hanusch
1
1
University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria
While journalists and their professional views, attitudes and backgrounds have been the subject of academic study since at least the 1950s, comparatively
less attention has been given to the ways in which journalists are socialized through university education, an increasingly dominant pathway into journal‑
ism in a large number of countries around the world. Even when such work has been undertaken, it has often focused on educators’perceptions or reports
of particular educational programs, while journalism students’ views have been less regularly countenanced. Over the past decade or so, this has been
slowly changing, yet there is still a relative gap in our understanding of the influence of university education on emerging journalists. The professional
values and attitudes of journalism can be learned and internalized by journalists by way of living different experiences in a variety of settings and by inter‑
acting with multiple sources, including those stemming from professional educational settings, which are therefore important to investigate. As a result
of the popularity of tertiary journalism education in recent decades, a number of studies have examined the ways in which journalism students see their
work and the extent to which university education may account for these worldviews. However, while there now exists a sizeable body of work on individual
nations’ journalism students, rarely have such studies attempted to compare their results across nations in order to examine the extent to which findings
may be nation-specific or cross-nationally applicable. Comparative research on journalists has pointed to some universal aspects but also to considerable
differences across the globe. Research on journalism education models has also pointed to considerable differences, and even within a continent such as Eu‑
rope, scholars report significant differences between countries.This paper provides an introduction to the rationale and organization of the study Journalism
Students Across the Globe, a cooperative academic endeavor connecting journalism scholars in 30 countries. It presents and discusses some of the important
parameters of the study, thus framing the following four papers in the panel. It does so by providing an overview of the various contexts in which journalism
students study around the globe, providing comparative data across the countries and universities involved in the research. Further, it identifies who actu‑
ally studies journalism in each of the countries, drawing out similarities and differences across political, economic, social and cultural contexts. This is done
by examining students’ age, gender, political views, their progress in their education, previous education, their interest in politics, as well as their family
backgrounds and the economic conditions in which they grew up. Thus, the paper will present a series of profiles of journalism students, which will enable
a better understanding of who these future journalists are. This richer understanding of who actually are journalism students allows for improved analysis
of some of the individual-, institutional- and national-level factors which may impact the development of certain views about journalism.