The Failed Adoption of Journalism Study

The academic study of journalism resembles in many ways a failed adoption. Journalism study has no certain home, nurturing forces split by divisiveness and territoriality, and birth, foster, and adoptive parents at such cross-purposes that they cannot understand the child at the core of their attentions. Journalism is too important not to be understood by everyone, and universities need to play a role in helping to explain how it works. Yet the counterproductive actions of three agents—journalism professionals, academics who study journalism, and academics who care little for the study of journalism—are pushing the study of journalism into crisis mode. Meanwhile, as journalism itself continues to grow in the shadow of tensions about its appropriate placement in the academy, it begins to resemble a child whose inexplicable behavior is accountable only to itself.