Research Papers/Articles - Institute of Management Studies Dehradun

Mass Communication Education in India: A Status Report
Improving Journalism Education
At the First World Journalism Education Congress (WJEC)
held in June 2007 in Singapore, 400 delegates from 45
countries highlighted these opportunities and challenges.
They noted that in many countries journalism education
remains a stepchild at the universities despite growing
enrollments. Most programs lack the money and
institutional support to reform and adapt to the digital age.
Too many universities focus heavily on the theory of
journalism and fail to provide hands-on experiences to
students. The UNESCO model curricula for developing
countries that were unveiled at the WJEC advocate a
balance between theory and practice. This may be a useful
starting point for some journalism schools, but it is clear
that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to universitybased
journalism training.
A key to improving journalism education around the world
is ability of the media developers—government agencies,
founda¬tions, and multilateral organizations that support
reform in journalism education—to grasp a picture of the
challenges facing journalism educators and focus their
support where it can be most effective.
The media sector has changed dramati¬cally, but many
journalism programs fail to meet the new challenges of the
industry. Media developers can help overcome this gap in
several ways: funding teacher training and curriculum
development, providing updated educa¬tional materials
and adequate equipment, facilitating the creation of
student-run media to develop practical skills, and funding
cross-disciplinary partnerships and programmes.
Although journalism departments had begun with lofty
ideals and great expectations for the advancement of the
press and the public, many were little more than industryoriented
trade schools by the 1970s and 1980s. The
paradigm of mass communication education has not
changed much over the years despite massive changes
throughout the field of mass communication.
The general state of journalism and mass communication
education is dismal. It is a field grossly underfunded, even
when compared with other university departments, schools
and colleges. Journalism/mass communication units have
large, sometimes massive, enrollments, and tiny,
overworked faculties, again by standards of the university
generally. These units rarely play a major role in the
governance of the university and rarely provide persons for
the top cadre of leadership.
In the midst of what has been called a communication
revolution, the nation's journalism/mass communication
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schools seem anything but revolutionary. In their
fundamental structure and curricular offerings, they had
not changed much in decades until recently. What
changes they had made were typically incremental course
additions and occasionally new sequences of study.
Mass communication education in India can’t progress
significantly if there is not a clear critique of its central
dilemmas, be they financial, structural, intellectual or
simply human. While any critique of journalism/mass
communication education tends to point up deficiencies,
there are many understandable reasons for the field's
problems. At the same time, there is much that is right with
journalism/mass communication education, which-with
all its faults is still the best of its kind. A SWOT (Strengths,
Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis of
journalism education brings to fore the weaknesses and
strengths of today’s journalism education in Indian
universities.
The curricula of journalism & mass communication now
taught as Bachelor, Master and Post Graduate Diploma
courses at the university level are invariably the ones
recommended by the University Grants Commission
(UGC). Of late, new papers like Corporate
Communication, New Media Technology, Inter-cultural
Communication, Environmental Communication, Health
Communication, Science & Technology Communication,
Human Rights and Media, among others have been
incorporated either as compulsory or optional papers at
the Post-Graduate level in Indian universities. There is an
acute need of relevant books on these new and advanced
topics by Indian authors and in Hindi in particular as old
books by western authors are of not much use to Indian
students. Development of skills and value-oriented syllabi
and alternative teaching materials should be given high
priority in the journalism & mass communication courses
in the Indian context.
Overworked and overcommitted faculties can hardly be
expected to thoughtfully debate the implications of
paradigm change in mass communication for mass
communication education. Hence, journalism
departments were not exactly centers of innovation. They
were regarded as following industry, not leading it; as the
handmaiden to industry, not its critic or visionary guide.
There are still very few departments of journalism & mass
communication who can claim to fulfill the UGC norm of
minimum staffing pattern which adversely affects the
teaching of students as well as the research. To meet
emerging challenges in journalism & mass commun
ication, UGC and the universities must take prompt
measures to fill up the posts lying vacant for several years.
"Pragyaan: Journal of Mass Communication" Volume 10, Issue 1, June 2012