Making the 21st Century Mobile Journalist: Examining Definitions and Conceptualizations of Mobility and Mobile Journalism within Journalism Education

Abstract

This paper considers new and old challenges to journalism production and education, focusing on the rising field of mobile journalism. The article examines how journalism schools are adapting to the increasing integration and proliferation of mobile technologies within journalism production and consumption, and the increasing trend to incorporate technical skills training within courses. In addition, it integrates the “mobilities paradigm” to insert questions about the social meanings and implications of the “mobile turn” within journalism and journalism education, exploring how mobile subjectivities are deeply embedded within and undergird mobile journalism and journalism education infrastructures. In all, while the technical skills of mobile journalism are important to training successful professional journalists, the analysis points toward a need for the re-definition and re-orientation of mobile journalism education toward the unequal power relations and broader and societal implications of mobile journalism whereby journalists’ labor is increasingly and contradictingly more precarious, immobile, and invisible than imagined within educational priorities.

Keywords:

• Mobile technology
• mobilities
• mobile journalism
• digital journalism
• journalism education
• labor

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to kindly acknowledge Drs. Hernan Galperin (University of Southern California) and Andrea Wenzel (Temple University) for their generative feedback and support in this paper’s earliest conception.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 This sample comprised the AEJMC accredited programs that were willing to give researchers access to (or made publicly available) their back catalogue of syllabi.

2 During a review of academic literature and public press coverage of mobile journalism the researchers noted an uptake of concern in the topic around 2008 and increasing thereafter. 2010 was therefore chosen as an appropriate date for starting the syllabi review because researchers expected education programs to have taken on mobile concerns by this time, reflecting popular and academic discourse.

3 The pilot school was the researchers’ home institution.

4 Although, it should be noted that few of these offerings appeared to be “core” classes, rather they were presented as optional courses students could elect to partake in.