Afterthoughts: So Where Are We to Turn in the Study of Journalism

The contributors to this symposium on the identity, mission, and direction of journalism studies have raised more questions than answers. Each contributor faced responding to: what is required to ensure that journalism’s scholarship remains connected with its practice and criticism? How are we to study journalism in a way that will keep it vital, relevant, and yet connected to impulses that go beyond the world of newsmaking? How are we to create a future for the study of journalism? While answering questions with questions is a rhetorical strategy with sometimes positive implications, here it appears to fasten ambivalence and uncertainty as the default assumptions underlying the study of journalism.