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From left to right: Dr. Geoffrey Graybeal, Dr. C. Ann Hollifield, and Dr. Lee B. Becker, at the awards ceremony for top faculty paper for 2016 AEJMC conference. |
Cox Center Researchers Receive Award At Journalism And Mass Communication Education Conference
Researchers in the Cox International Center, for the second year in a row, were honored by the Media Management, Economics and Entrepreneurship Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication for their research.
The team presented the paper, “The Labor Market for University Journalism and Mass Communication Graduates: The Role of the Media Industries,” at the annual conference of Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication in early August in Minneapolis.
The Media Management, Economics and Entrepreneurship Division selected the paper as the top faculty paper presented at the conference.
The paper provides evidence that enrollments in university journalism and mass communication programs around the country have exceeded demand, producing lower employment rates for those graduates in recent years.
&The data come from a 25-plus year of study of journalism and mass communication education and its labor markets that has been housed in the Cox International Center since 1997.
Cox Center Director Dr. Lee B. Becker was lead author on the paper. Dr. C. Ann Hollifield, faculty member in the Department of Journalism in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, was the second author. Dr. Tudor Vlad, associate director of the Cox Center, was the third author.
The James M. Cox Jr. Center for International Mass Communication Training and Research is a unit of the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia.
Drs. Becker and Hollifield presented the paper on Aug. 5 at the conference, held at the Hilton Hotel in downtown Minneapolis. The conference itself was from Aug. 4 to 7, with more than 1,400 attendees from around the world.
The key findings of the paper confirm general expectations about the entry-level labor market for journalism and mass communication graduates.
The market is affected first and foremost by the overall labor market, so graduates from journalism and mass communication programs had more success finding jobs when the market itself was good.
But even when the effects of the overall market were removed, the number of graduates as well as the vitality of the media industries made a difference.
The Media Management, Economics and Entrepreneurship Division selected papers from research teams at Rutgers University and from City University of London and the University of Groeningen in The Netherlands as other top faculty papers.
Last year, the division selected a paper presented by Drs. Hollifield, Becker and Vlad and Dr. Adam Jacobsson and Eva-Maria Jacobsson from Sweden as the top faculty paper at that conference.
Click here for a copy of last year's paper
At the conference in Minneapolis, Dr. Becker also led a discussion about curricular change and citizen-centered journalism at a session organized by the Kettering Foundation of Dayton, Ohio. Dr. Becker is a part of a group of journalism educators assembled by the Kettering Foundation to discuss journalism education and its role in fostering the democratic process.
