ABSTRACT

The argument, evidence and research in this collection unravel across three distinctive sections which deal in turn with journalism education, training and employment. Donica Mensing’s opening essay constitutes a clarion call to journalism educators, inviting them to undertake a radical reconsideration of their activities in the context of new digital media technologies with their implications for both journalism practice and education. She advocates a shift from the current “industrial model” of journalism education with its emphasis on journalism “as a process of transmission from producer to receiver” towards a focus on community networks which emphasise “the needs of community fi rst and [constitute] the journalist [as] one node in a network of relationships.” Such an approach offers the promise of re-establishing journalism’s “natural connection with community” and its democratic roots, while also allowing journalists to realise the potential advantages deriving from new forms of news gathering, production, editing and distribution inherent in new media technologies. She concludes by examining the prospects and possibilities for this approach to journalism education by outlining four community based projects which require students to invent new ways of practicing journalism by “listening carefully to individual citizens.”