Call for Papers

The Future of Journalism – Developments and Debates

Thursday 8^th and Friday 9^th September 2011

Following the success of the Journalism Practice and Journalism Studies conferences in 2007 and 2009, we are delighted to announce that the third in this series of biennial research-based conferences – to be hosted by the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies (JOMEC) and sponsored by Routledge Taylor and Francis – will again focus on the topic: The Future of Journalism. The Plenary speakers will be Emily Bell and Robert W. McChesney.

Emily Bell is Professor of Professional Practice and Director of the Tow Centre for Digital Journalism at the Columbia School of Journalism. Previously she worked at the Guardian, initially as Founder and Editor of mediaguardian.co.uk and later as editor-in-chief of Guardian Unlimited.

Robert W. McChesney is the Gutgsell Endowed Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is Co-author (with John Nicholls) of The Death and Life of American Journalism, as well as Rich Media, Poor Democracy and 14 other authored or edited volumes. The Utne Reader lists him among their “50 visionaries who are changing the world”).

The plenary lectures, as well as a selection of conference papers will be published in special issues of Journalism Practice and Journalism Studies.

We invite contributions from the international community of scholars of journalism studies, journalism practitioners, educators and trainers, media executives, trade unionists and media regulators; indeed everyone with scholarly or practitioner interests in the future of journalism.

The pace of developments in journalism has accelerated since 2009. Innovations in media technologies, increasingly competitive and fragmented markets for audiences and advertising revenues, shifts in government media policy and changing audience requirements for news and the ways in which it is presented and delivered, bring with them extraordinary challenges to journalism and journalists. Such developments impact on journalists’ employment, their workplaces, products and perceptions of their professional roles and ethical judgements, as well as their day-to-day journalism practice.

But the changes confronting journalism are perhaps too frequently understood and framed as a ‘Crisis’. They also offer the potential and prospect for a different journalism based on new technologies, involving distinctive ways of writing and presenting news, conducted in converged newsrooms or wholly outside of conventional newsrooms, funded with innovative sources of revenue, and all this informed by continuously shifting understandings of what constitutes journalism and who is a journalist. So a good deal to discuss and debate.

Titles and abstracts for papers (250 words max) are invited by 22^nd December 2010 and should be submitted online at:

http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/jomec/conference/futureofjournalism/submission/

Papers should address one of the following five key questions, which constitute the conference themes:

1.    Journalism practice and changing technologies – how are developments in media technologies across all platforms shaping a new journalism practice, especially novel routines for news reporting which include citizen journalism, crowdfunding/sourcing, social networking sites and (micro) blogging?

2.    Global journalism developments – how are these changes unravelling in different national settings with their distinctive journalism cultures, audiences, media structures and histories?

3.    Business models and funding journalism – what are the implications of these changes for the revenues traditionally available to fund journalism and what business models are emerging (for example the use of pay walls) to resource newly emerging forms of journalism?

4.    Journalism professionalism – what are the consequences of these developments for the education, training and employment of journalists, as well as journalists’ changing perceptions of their professional roles and identity?

5.    Journalism, democracy and ethics – in what ways do these changes impact on journalism’s wider connections with the political and democratic life of communities locally, regionally, nationally and internationally?