Reflections on 100 Years of Journalism Studies in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly (and Almost 25 Years in Journalism Studies)

The second keynote at the Future of Journalism 2023 conference today is by the wonderful Jane B. Singer, who will be reflecting on the past and future of journalism studies as a field. We can mark somewhere around 100 years as journalism studies now, as the first issue of Journalism Quarterly (now Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly) was published in 1924 – and much of the research published since then has attempted to define journalism as an object of study, and sometimes also explored the prospective future of journalism. Editors of this and other major journals in the field have at times also published retrospective reflections on the development of the field during their time. Jane’s keynote reflects mainly on the content of both JMCQ and Journalism Studies.

The 100 years (or 4,400 articles) of JMCQ roughly divide into three different eras: 1925-64, on the emergence of journalism as a subject of study; 1965-94, when journalism found its footing through more and more rigorous scholarship; and 1995-22, when journalism studies matured (and the journal title expanded to also include the study of mass communication). The early phase placed an emphasis on journalism education, with more than half of all articles sampled focussing on the question of how to teach journalism at universities; other articles made contributions on the history of journalism (if largely through anecdotes rather than through rigorous scholarship). A social science perspective arose only gradually through this first period, as journalism academics with a social science background began to turn their focus towards journalism as an object of study. An overwhelming proportion of articles during this time were authored by men, and predominantly based in the US. Many articles during this time were impressionistic or descriptive, with little rigorous scholarship.

The middle period showed a transition towards empirical scholarship: quantitative approaches gained prominence, with surveys and content analyses especially common. Work was increasingly likely to be guided by underlying conceptual frameworks, with ideas imported from the social sciences; those frameworks were not yet being tested with particular rigour, however. There was greater interest in the content of news coverage, and more focus on news audiences as well. The work during this time could be more readily recognised as scholarship in the current sense. The cultural and political upheavals during the 1960s and 70s remained remarkably underresearched during this time, however, and the overall focus remained largely on US journalism. Perhaps some 20% of first and second authors now appeared to be female.

The third period coincides with the emergence of the digital age, as well as with a general diversification of publication venues for journalism studies; several other journalism studies journals also launched during this time. JMCQ was no longer the only central venue for research in this area – just at the time that the field finally gained further theoretical and methodological rigour, began to focus more on current social and political issues, and even to look beyond the confines of the United States. The balance between men and women adjusted to 2:1 now, and within the past three years both were even evenly represented (to the extent that this can be ascertained from the first names of contributors, which is the only available indicator). The number of articles authored by more than two contributors also increased notably.

This analysis maps out a long and difficult gestation process for journalism research, then; such research has gradually broadened its scope, increased its rigour, and boosted its intellectual heft. However, the influence of (almost certainly white) American men on the study of journalism cannot be ignored, and the diversification in journalism studies journals since the mid-1990s might well be a reaction to these limitations. This is why Jane and colleagues also explored the content of Journalism Studies since its launch in 2000 – another 1,600 articles from which they drew a sample for analysis. This analysis is still ongoing, but an analysis of invited articles and all articles in the first 25 issues and the most recent 25 issues shows some useful trends.

Early invited articles, in particular, covered debates relating to press regulation, public journalism, journalism education, communications research, strategic communication and propaganda, journalism history, convergence, newsroom ethics, press freedom, and many more; but they still overwhelmingly featured authors from the US, and considerably more men than women. There were also interview pieces with thinkers including Ulrich Beck, Chantal Mouffe, Zygmunt Bauman, Seyla Benhabib, Heinz von Förster and Paul Watzlawick, and Francis Nyamnjoh, as well as theory reviews of the work of Bourdieu, Foucault, Gadamer, and Luhmann. These didn’t last very long. Editors of special issues were considerably more international than contributors to JMCQ, but heavily favoured the Global North.

So, Journalism Studies experimented with greater diversification in formats, content, and editorship, but only to a limited extent; the balance between male and female authors has nearly equalised in recent years. The Global North still dominates, both in terms of the authors’ location and the geographical focus of their research; this is also slowly shifting, however. There is also still relatively little focus on current social and political issues, at least in the sample of articles explored so far. Key methods here were content analysis, interviews, and surveys; theories are diverse but without much standardisation or repetition.

Journalism and journalism studies are thus still very much defined through the analysis of practice and practitioners from the Global North; this necessarily provides only a very limited perspective that we should actively strive to broaden. There is still also an overwhelming focus on news content and the news workers and news organisations that produce it; news audiences and news users deserve a great deal more attention than they receive. Both journals show the ongoing professionalisation of journalism studies – yet our toolkits remain narrow limited, and the objects of research that these are applied to are as well (nobody needs another study of the content of the New York Times, Jane almost says). Conceptually, too, we remain shallow – we have few concepts that are widely accepted and used, and few consistently useful theories. We still struggle to conceptualise journalism.

This may be because journalism studies is diversely sociological, psychological, economic, normative, historical, and more. We are finding it difficult to extract consistent meanings from our object of study, even though after more than 100 years we certainly cannot call this an emerging field of study any more.