Journalism Classrooms Research Articles

Creating the new journalism classroom for a future in the balance: A not so modest proposal for a pedagogy of care, dialogue and critique

Creating the new journalism classroom for a future in the balance: A not so modest proposal for a pedagogy of care, dialogue and critique

Socializing students to accept hostility? How instructors talk about hostility in the journalism classroom

Although hostility toward journalists is a pressing issue, research on how instructors are preparing students for hostility is lacking. Interviews with 30 journalism instructors from across the U.S. help illuminate how hostility is perceived and if/how hostility is talked about in journalism courses. Through the lens of professional socialization, this manuscript argues the majority of instructors normalize hostility in problematic ways, identifying a gap in journalism curriculum that needs filled.

The Diversity Experiment at the Metropolitan State University of Denver

This is an untarnished statement after events surrounding Black Lives Matter and the #Metoo movements of the past years. However, when we look at the reality of diversity inside the newsrooms in America, we quickly realize how far we are from a newsroom representing most ethnic sectors of the American population. This article looks closely at how diversity, when incorporated inside the journalism classroom, can improve the quality of news produced by journalists in the newsroom. The hypothesis is simple: an ethnically diverse newsroom is necessary for news organizations to provide a well-researched story that represents different voices. Society is changing. It is becoming more diverse. Newsrooms will fail and be left behind if they do not reflect this change. Joanne Bourgault, President, and CEO of Interviews, believes that: “Maintaining a diverse workforce and providing inclusive content are imperative for the longevity of any media platform” (Bourgault, 2021). Many experts agree that diversity can have a monumental impact on the quality of journalism because a more diverse staff is likely to produce a broader range of stories and perspectives. Our data will ultimately confirm that any successful efforts to improve diversity in the classrooms, like the one taken at The Metropolitan State University of Denver (MSU-Denver), will eventually have positive results in enhancing the diversity hiring practices of news media organizations. The news outputs these media organizations develop should accurately reflect the diverse society it serves. In gathering this content, an ethnically diverse journalist can and will contribute to better and more engaging content.

Whose Post-Truth Era? Confronting the Epistemological Challenges of Teaching Journalism

While discussions on validity, professional standards, and routines have become more challenging to many educators of journalism, these challenges are old news to communities of color whose experiences are often discounted or erased by information gathering practices taught in journalism schools. We argue that using the label “post-truth” reinforces the privileged and entitled position of journalism educators, and curtails our responsibility as arbiters of professional practice and routine. In this article, we examine how journalism classrooms can bring in ways of knowing and seeing that can provide a refreshing counter to the staid dis-embedded outsider perspective that views journalism as the protector of one truth, liberal democracy. Borrowing ideas from press theory that places journalism inside community, and counterpublic theory that places agency inside culture, we explore an opportunity for journalists to become mediators and translators between publics as a way to strengthen understanding between communities. To do so, we identify and examine reporting practices used in the Black press to understand how to confront the multiplicity of truth. By unpacking how the ethnic press examines the diverse conditions and experiences that lead to alternative versions of events, we can better gauge what reporting practices are relevant to our students today. Indeed, the so-called post-truth era is part of a larger sociohistoric process of truth-making that reflects the dynamics of power and authority in civil society, which we unpack in this article. In the end, we argue that it is more valuable for journalism students to view their work as mediators and translators of truths between communities.

Teaching vicarious trauma in the journalism classroom: An examination of educational provision in UK universities

Abstract The connections between vicarious trauma and the viewing of violent User-Generated Content (UGC) are becoming an increasingly important topic in journalism. As more journalist work begins to rely, or at least incorporate UGC, the risks to journalists have been shown to increase. This can lead to short, unpleasant careers, and in some cases, serious, long-lasting mental health risks. Yet while this discussion is beginning to unfold in the newsroom, universities are lagging behind in their understanding of the topic. This article, through content analysis of undergraduate course materials, and through interviews with lecturers and journalists, found that almost no course in the United Kingdom is teaching the risks of vicarious trauma or UGC. It was found that while some educators wish to make more of the topic, a number of institutional factors, such as lack of training and time, worries over duty of care, and available resources make this a difficult, if not impossible task. The article recommends a new emphasis is placed on vicarious trauma, coupled with training and interdepartmental support.

Writing stories, rewriting identities: using journalism education and mobile technologies to empower marginalized high school students

ABSTRACTThis study examines the impact that producing a print newspaper using cell phones had on marginalized students in a high school journalism classroom. Analysis of data from participant observation, artifact analysis and student interviews revealed that a) students negotiated cell phone use for educational purposes, despite school bans on such devices, and b) students manifested emerging, transformative identities that positively influenced their roles in five key areas: as a conception of self, in other academic classes, among peers, with family, and in the community. Our findings point to the significance of media-based journalism production in allowing marginalized students to embrace professional identities by participating in a meaningful community of practice. This research highlights the academic, social and civic benefits of such initiatives, and calls attention to the range of opportunities and challenges that pertain to using mobile devices as learning tools in these contexts.

Curation challenges and opportunities: Storify as a participatory reporting tool in a journalism school newsroom

News curation tool Storify is a publication platform for journalism and news now used by diverse mainstream media, (including ABC News, The Times, Al Jazeera and The Washington Post), news wire services (Associated Press and Agence France-Presse), and news generators (the White House, United Nations and World Bank, to name a few) to curate and publish ‘social stories’ online. Within the journalism classroom, Storify is recognised as having value in enabling students to produce news stories based on social content while also challenging them to assess content, consider agendas and develop news consumption and storytelling skills (Mihailidis & Cohen, 2013; Thorsen, 2013; Sacco & Bossio, 2014). Its use raises issues that go to the heart of journalism ethics, including questions over repurposing of material, relationships to sources, use of non-elite or vulnerable voices, source selection and the need to check veracity. This requires educators to revisit the need for skill development in selection and verification of content. This article examines five lessons learned in the use of Storify in a journalism class newsroom as a tool to curate breaking news about the search for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 and how these lessons have altered teaching practice.

Making Mojos

Journalism students can no longer focus on being just writers or photographers or videographers. They must leave college with a multitude of media skills to have the greatest potential for career success. The development of the iPad and supporting apps has created a “one-stop shop” of journalistic tools that enable students to learn those skills, including note-taking devices, recording devices, research platforms, and word processing. We conducted a yearlong study of beginning journalism students utilizing one-to-one iPads to examine the impact of iPads and journalistically focused apps in a “flipped” journalism classroom environment (where video lectures are homework, and skill development and execution are done in class). Our goal was to identify how the iPad could be used to augment journalistic training and determine whether use of such technology would accelerate and enhance student learning. We found that confidence in the iPad as a journalistic tool and perceptions of journalistic ability increased, as did students’ execution of publishable-quality writing assignments. Qualitative results identified some of the challenges and benefits related to iPad use in a journalism class. Overall, we found that students did utilize the iPad and apps to more quickly create publishable-quality journalism assignments, which included effective reporting and use of multimedia and social media.

What is Needed versus What is Taught

This article reports on a survey of journalism students’ perception of what is taught in online journalism classrooms and what instructors perceive to be important for students to be work-ready for online newsrooms. The results show that online journalism education is still defined by traditional journalism, for instance, in tasks specialization, when future journalists are required to be well versed in multiple aspects of journalism and technology. The survey finds that people skills and communication abilities have become a must in this new media age, and that instructors’ previous online journalism experience may make a crucial difference in classroom instruction. For online journalism educators and programme administrators, this article may help in developing the appropriate curriculum to prepare students to work in the changing media industry.

The Gap between Online Journalism Education and Practice

This twin survey of online journalism professionals and students examines their perceptions of journalism skills, duties, and concepts. Using samples of online journalists and journalism students in Hong Kong, Asia’s media hub, it attempts to offer updated insights into the changes taking place in journalism classrooms and newsrooms and uncovers the discordance between online journalism education and practice. The study finds that traditional journalistic skills remain prioritized over technical skills in online newsrooms. The findings also suggest that today’s journalism students are fairly proficient in new media skills. Therefore, journalism curricula should not forgo training students in traditional journalistic skills for computer skills.

Locating Whiteness in Journalism Pedagogy

A consistent thread woven through scholarship on diversity and journalism education recommends appending multicultural content onto existing curricula or adding bodies of color to student or faculty ranks in order to improve the way marginalized communities are reported by the news media. Less attention, however, has been paid to studying the ways whiteness manifests in their academic socialization and whether its presence impinges the training of students to reflect the lived realities of communities of color. This essay explores how the teaching of various newsgathering routines and values might be fashioned by whiteness. Data collected using a mixed approach (observations of two journalism classrooms and an ideological critical analysis of traditionally used journalism textbooks), is analyzed through a critical whiteness studies lens, primarily by identifying rhetorical configurations of whiteness, but also by locating boundaries established by a white perspective. Findings indicate that three pedagogical strategies encouraged students to generate news stories delimited by predominantly white experiences and that the pedagogy and material used to teach about racial diversity mirrors many of the subversive discursive strategies whites use to engage conversations about race—individualism, distorted racism, negation, and normativity—essentially obscuring white privilege and sabotaging racial progress. As a result, current journalism pedagogy can be read as impeding racial justice because of the pervasiveness of whiteness in media training leaves a racialized social structure unchallenged.

The Gap between Online Journalism Education and Practice: The Twin Surveys

This U.S. national survey of online journalism professionals and instructors examines and compares their perceptions of skills, concepts, and duties. It offers updated insights into the changes taking place in online journalism classrooms and newsrooms, and uncovers the discordance between online journalism education and practice. The results show that online journalism education is tied to traditional journalism in many ways, but is not merely a more technologically focused version of traditional journalism. Future journalists should be trained to be well-versed in multiple aspects of journalism and technology, rather than specializing in only one or two types of tasks.

Preparing for the Worst: Making a Case for Trauma Training in the Journalism Classroom

This study is an attempt to build support for including trauma training in the journalism classroom. Qualitative interviews with students who covered a death-penalty murder trial and results from a quantitative survey of journalism students are combined to show that preparing students for the emotional reactions they may experience while covering the news is not only needed but wanted by the students themselves. Implications and directions for future research are also discussed.

Public journalism

This article analyzes and responds to the most significant criticisms of public journalism made by scholars. After discussing public journalism advocates’ alleged failure to define public journalism clearly, we examine more specific criticisms. Among other issues, few advocates have taken seriously the likely impact of commercial imperatives on public journalism's modes of operation. We argue, however, that public journalism projects show that reform-oriented news organizations can challenge long-standing journalistic conventions, despite managements’ interests in maximizing profit. Ultimately, we argue, public journalism's long-term viability depends on continuing, explicit commitment by journalists, its institutionalization within newsrooms and journalism classrooms, and continued theory-development, research, and assessment.

NRJ Book: Math Tools for Journalists, Numbers in the Newsroom: Using Math and Statistics in News

Math Tools for Journalists. By Kathleen Woodruff Wickham (Oak Park, Ill.: Marion Street Press, 2002), 159 pages, $16.95. Numbers in the Newsroom: Using Math and Statistics in News. By Sarah Cohen (Columbia, Mo.: Investigative Reporters and Editors, 2001), 108 pages, $25. Reviewed by Scott R. Maier In a focus group on newsroom use of math, a frazzled copy editor pleaded almost tearfully for a reference book she could consult on journalistic use of numbers just as she turns to the AP Stylebook for guidance on language. Fortunately, two excellent handbooks now provide a guide to the math that reporters and editors commonly encounter in their work. Math Tools for Journalists by Kathleen Woodruff Wickham and Numbers in the Newsroom by Sarah Cohen are written on the premise that all journalists, despite their pervasive fear of numbers, need math to describe the complex world that the numbers represent. Both books seek to help take the terror out of reporting numbers by conveying math fundamentals in practical journalistic terms. Both emphasize basic math but are comprehensive in their reach. And both books draw on the authors' extensive experience in the newsroom as well as in the classroom. In spite of their similarities, each differs in its approach to making math accessible to journalists. In Math Tools for Journalists, Wickham notes that journalists should be able to perform basic math before they begin their basic writing courses, but many cannot because these skills were learned long ago and shunted aside. She writes: not that journalists can't do basic math. It's that journalists have forgotten how. To address this deficiency, Wickham starts with the most basic math -- addition and subtraction - and covers increasingly complex topics ranging from percentage change to statistical analysis. For example, Wickham explains and demonstrates standard deviation in terms that journalists can understand. A former reporter who now teaches journalism at the University of Mississippi at Oxford, Wickham has devised skill drills (with answers) that apply to math problems that reporters confront on the job. In addition, each chapter provides Learning Challenges - hands-on activities that take the math lessons out of the classroom and into the real world. Underscoring the point that all journalists need math, Wickham sprinkles capsule accounts of real-life use of numbers in the news throughout her book. These components make Math Tools for Journalists especially useful in the journalism classroom. In Numbers in the Newsroom, Cohen seeks to show that skillful use of numbers requires journalistic sensibility. Selecting the right number for just the right place in a story, Cohen says, depends on the same news judgment you use in selecting just the right quote, anecdote or image. …

Expanding the News Frame: The Systems Theory Perspective

As criticism of journalism increasingly points to narrowness of news coverage, what role in expanding news frame might we expect from future reporters now in journalism classrooms? And what role might journalism educators play in preparing them? Critics of contemporary journalism claim news media too often report news without sufficient context,' focus excessively on events,2 and rely too heavily on routine channels and official sources.3 Election coverage is criticized for dwelling on horserace aspects to exclusion of issues4 and for being increasingly negative as campaign progresses.5 growing use of sound bites by broadcast media means audience members are getting increasingly smaller snippets of information.fi In other words, news frame may be due for expansion. A news frame suggests how events and issues should be viewed by readers and viewers. news is framed by reporters through processes of selection, emphasis, exclusion, and elaboration7-processes influenced by traditional routines and news values. These processes result in inevitable narrowing of news frame, and ultimately of readers' views of events and issues. One tool educators can offer journalism students for expanding news frame is general systems perspective. A systems perspective provides means for thinking about problems and events at number of levels, and can effectively broaden our conception of journalist's role. Ludwig von Bertalanffy, developer of general system theory, suggested that most of major problems facing world can only be solved if approached with systems perspective. Davidson notes that the fault, as viewed from perspective of Bertalanffian GST, is not in our stars and not entirely in ourselves-but substantially in our systems. 8 This article outlines main features of systems perspective, focusing on general system theory, and suggests that teaching future reporters to think of news events and issues in systems terms may be one approach to expanding news frame. General systems systems perspective as applied to task of teaching news reporting has three major components that will be discussed here: interaction among variables (or notion that phenomenon is `more than sum of its parts'), mutual causation and outcomes, and hierarchy. We suggest that if future reporters can learn to think of social phenomena and events in these terms, they can contribute to expansion of news frame. credit for founding of general system usually is given to Ludwig von Bertalanffy, eclectic scholar whose early training was in biology.9 In 1940, Bertalanffy introduced theory of organism as open system.10 General system came about largely as response to inadequacies that Bertalanffy saw in dominant model of scholarly inquiry at time-the analytical, mechanistic model that originated in physics. This model assumes that an entity investigated can be resolved into, and hence can be constituted or reconstituted from, parts put together. This analytical model shows up in search for isolable causes or sequences of causes and seeking of basic or atomic units. Bertalanffy wrote: The meaning of somewhat mystical expression, `The whole is more than sum of parts' is simply that constitutive characteristics are not explainable from characteristics of isolated parts.12 He defined system as a set of elements standing in interaction.13 Another important concept of general system is mutual causation. In contrast to mechanistic, analytical model of thinking found in physics, which suggests one-way causal path, GST suggests that is often mutual, multiple and circular. In book relating general system to communication, Ruben and Kim claim that causality is multi-lateral among parts of system, among systems, and among systems and their environments. …

Self-Efficacy, Media Use as Predictors of Current-Events Knowledge

The news quiz has doubtless been used as a tool in journalism classrooms since introductory skills courses were first taught. And just as certainly, journalism instructors have gathered together in hand-wringing sessions to disdain their students' poor performance on those quizzes. However, trends showing dramatic decreases in newspaper reading among young (see Baskette, Sissors, & Brooks, 1992) have given a special imperative to concern about young people's current-affairs awareness, especially among journalism students.News quizzes seem to play two roles in journalism skills classroom: First, they act as a pedagogical catalyst to promote habitual news media use; second, quizzes serve as an evaluative device, to measure current-events knowledge. Implicit in both goals is assumption that increased news-media use will cause student to be better informed about current events. However obvious that assumption may seem, it not consider possibility that background variables other than media use may be driving current-affairs knowledge.Rosenberg's (1968) classic discussion of surveys warned of contingent associations driven by extraneous variables that go unmeasured. Such variables can be collinear with dimensions of central interest to processes under investigation. He points out that strictly speaking there are no spurious relationships, there are only spurious interpretations (p. 28).In that regard, this study looks at effects of two other background variables--political self-efficacy and grade point average--on current-affairs knowledge.Media use as a predictor of knowledge. The paradox of mass media effects research is expectation of a strong relationship, where empirical evidence supports only a weak one. Beniger (1990) documents nine theoretical attempts to unravel paradox, including agenda setting (see McCombs & Shaw, 1972), uses and gratifications (see Blumler & Katz, 1974), spiral of silence (see Katz, 1984), and more.Despite this problem, journalism skills instructors still seem to adhere to a strong effects model when they routinely administer news quizzes. That is, assumption underlying use of quizzes is that mere exposure to news media will result in increased knowledge. However, results of current-affairs knowledge quizzes given in general population do not tend to support that notion (see Newhagen & Reeves, 1992). Results from those studies group people into one of two categories described by Converse (1964). One group is very small and makes up an active, well-informed, political elite. Members are older, belong to middle class, read newspapers every day, and do very well on current-affairs quizzes. The other group, however, is large and poorly in formed, essentially existing outside political system. This group is younger and relies more on television as a source of news (see Robinson, 1975, 1976); its members do badly on current-affairs quizzes.The canons of professional journalism proscribe membership in political elite. This makes sense, because many of characteristics regarded as positive in professional journalism also are to be found among members of political elite described by Converse. The socialization of journalism students to those norms can be seen, really, as part of rites of passage into this political elite. Prominent among traits common to both is active attention to political and civic affairs. This attention is a reflection, in a sense, of political efficacy.Political self-efficacy. Political efficacy was first defined as the feeling that individual political action have, or can have, an impact upon political process, i.e., that it is worthwhile to perform one's civic duties (Campbell, Gurin, & Miller, 1954, p. 187). This definition embodies question does my vote count? and focuses on an assessment of political system more than individual's ability to cope with it. …

Assessing the Managerial Roles of Black Female Public Relations Practitioners Using Individual and Organizational Discriminants

These buzz words of the 80s have provided insight into the changing communications industry and have prompted researchers and media professionals alike to analyze the fact that women are, in increasing numbers, taking over previously male-dominated fields. Demographically, the representation of women in the U.S. workforce has increased steadily during a 10-year period beginning in the 1970s. Women (18 years and older) comprised roughly 38% of the workforce in the 1970s. By 1980, that percentage had increased to more than 42% (Davis, 1980; Grossman, 1982). Two thirds of all public relations practitioners were projected to be women by 1990 (Dozier, Chapo, & Sullivan, 1983). While women have been making gains in the workplace, they have also had an impact in the nation's journalism classrooms. In 1984, nearly 73% of the students studying public relations were women (Peterson,