Boundaries, Barriers, and Champions: Understanding Digital Security Education in US Journalism Programs

ABSTRACT

Journalists are increasingly attacked in response to their work yet they often lack the necessary support and training to protect themselves, their sources, and their communications. Despite this, there has been limited scholarly attention that addresses how journalism schools approach digital security education. This paper draws from an analysis of 106 US programs and 23 semi-structured interviews with journalism students and professors to examine how the next generation of journalists learn about digital security practices. Our findings show that most programs (88.7%) don’t offer formal digital security programming and that digital security skills are often deprioritized in favor of skills seen as more significant contributors to post-graduate hiring—a key priority of journalism programs. Additional barriers include a lack of space and time in existing curricula for added digital security coursework, a perception that students are not interested, and few professors with related knowledge. When security education is introduced, it’s done so in often informal and ad-hoc ways, largely led by “security champions,” both within and outside of journalism, who advocate for its legitimacy. These findings have important implications for journalism education and journalists’ capacity to carry out their work amidst a deteriorating safety environment in the United States.

KEYWORDS:

• Journalism education
• information security
• journalism
• journalism schools
• digital security
• boundary-work

View correction statement:

Correction

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the interviewees for sharing their insights and experience.

Disclosure Statement

The article's co-author, Dr. Martin Shelton, developed a digital security education curriculum following this research that is not monetized, but in line with his organization's goals of providing digital security guidance to journalists and journalism educators.

Correction Statement

This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction (https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2022.2148267)

Notes

1 Information security refers to “the protection of information and information systems from unauthorized access, use, disclosure, disruption, modification, or destruction in order to provide confidentiality, integrity, and availability” (National Institute of Standards and Technology n.d.). Digital security means protecting your devices, accounts, networks and data from unauthorized access or attacks (Vigderman and Turner 2022). This paper will use the two terms interchangeably because interviewees did not distinguish between them.