AEJMC Newspaper & Online News Division The academic-professional "chasm"

[Carolyn Nielsen]

For those of us who teach journalism, there is also value in showing our students how our research speaks to the profession. It serves to marry theory to practice. In my advanced reporting class, for example, we were doing a big series on a complex environmental issue in our region. My students read and discussed Mike McCluskey's research showing how scientists are missing from environmental coverage, then my students had to question their own work. Most of them found that their stories were framed more in terms of economic rather than scientific impacts. This made an impression. Showing our students the value of this research in our own classrooms means we turn out journalists who buy into the importance of comm research and will tap into it once they are in newsrooms (probably via their alumni accounts to our university library). 

Carolyn Nielsen, Assistant Professor, Department of Journalism

 Office: (360) 650-3244
NOTE:  I usually respond more quickly to emails than to phone messages.
________________________________________
From: news-list-bounces at aejmc.net [news-list-bounces at aejmc.net] on behalf of John Russial [jrussial at uoregon.edu]
Sent: Sunday, June 24, 2012 9:29 PM
To: news-list at aejmc.net
Subject: Re: AEJMC Newspaper & Online News Division The academic-professional "chasm"

There are quite a few of us out here who do and publish research that
is heavily professional in focus and topical, and we try to write in
English. The fact that the stuff we publish often has some statistical
analysis doesn't have to be a barrier, which some folks seem to think
it is. Many reporters have, or should have, a basic familiarity with
statistical concepts (Remember Phil Meyer and Precision Journalism?),
and that's often all you need to understand a good bit of the research
published. Even if you're not comfortable with statistical concepts,
if we do our job well and write clearly, it should be fairly
accessible to journalists as well as academics.

John Russial
Former longtime journalist, current longtime academic.






_______________________________________________
News-list mailing list
News-list at aejmc.net
http://aejmc.net/mailman/listinfo/news-list_aejmc.net