Researchers Share Data at WJS Convention in Greece

By: Kelly Fisher
IIJ Assistant

Member-scholars of the Worlds of Journalism Study traveled from the United States, Qatar, Albania and El Salvador, and other countries, to attend the research group’s convention.

The convention, which took place March 27-29 in Thessaloniki, Greece, aimed to address the question, “Journalism in Transition: Crisis or Opportunity?,” which is a topic selected by the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA).

According to the Worlds of Journalism Study’s (WJS) official website, the organization “is an academically driven project that was founded to regularly assess the state of journalism throughout the world.

“The Study’s primary objective is to help journalism researchers, practitioners, media managers and policy makers better understand world views and changes that are taking place in the professional orientations of journalists, the conditions and limitations under which they operate, as well as the social functions of journalism in a changing world.”

Topics of the conference included methodological problems in survey research, exploring epistemology and news practice, violence against journalists in the Central American region and more.

Dr. Arnold De Beer of South Africa and Dr. Yusuf Kalyango, director of the Institute for International Journalism (IIJ) at Ohio University, was among the African scholars who talked about cross-national survey in a developing context.

More than 80 countries participated in the study, bringing in data from all over the world. Dr. Thomas Hanitzsch, chair of the Worlds of Journalism Study, said the Study’s data are expected to be published in mid-2015 and expects the book to be on shelves approximately two years later.