Shifting Spaces: How Journalism Students Perceive their Training through the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study explores how journalism students in one Canadian post-secondary programme perceived their training through the pandemic. We draw on journalism pedagogy literature, Bourdieu’s field theory, and Zelizer’s conceptualisation of interpretive communities to interrogate how remote learning disrupted opportunities for socialisation in the journalistic field. Through surveys of and interviews with students, we identify shared narratives of loss and perceptions of precarity in journalism careers. We argue emerging journalists’ perceptions of the pandemic period contribute to mapping the field and its practices. We conclude by considering how shared pandemic narratives of disruption add to conversations that interrupt the reproduction of spaces that foster burnout or overwork, as students and educators seize opportunities to reframe how journalism operates and how it is taught.