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Scholarly Journals

Scholarly research in journalism and media studies plays an important part in the academic field's health, prestige, and stability. Most faculty members teaching journalism, and especially media studies, are expected to conduct research. They cannot gain promotion or tenure unless they publish research that is significant in quality and quantity. The number of peer-reviewed journals publishing academic research in communication, journalism, and media (unless otherwise explicitly stated, all references below are to such journals) has increased in recent decades. Both individual scholars and publishing companies have inaugurated new journals; national academic organizations are agreeing to sponsor and sometimes to subsidize new journals; and new organizations are seeking to legitimize themselves and their perspectives by establishing journals. Proliferation of journals is not unique to journalism: there has been almost literally exponential growth in academic journal titles since the seventeenth century, as well as expansion in the number of pages of existing titles. Meanwhile, already established journals rarely go out of business.

In a chapter bemoaning communication scholars' failure to produce applied work, and their habit of talking much more to each other than to those outside the field (Avery and Eadie 1993), one former editor recalled that when he asked ABC for funds to help launch Critical Studies in Mass (now Media) Communication (CSMC), published since 1984, he warned that CSMC writers would be highly critical of American broadcasting. Apparently, ABC was not at all worried. The great number of journals in the field as well as in cognate areas would seem to compound the lack of relevance of any one of them. Indeed, much of the more recent expansion has served to balkanize already narrowly defined niches. As a result, scholars are publishing in journals that few will read or even cite. And even fewer outside the niche will see them. Some academic organizations are trying to attract more popular/public attention to scholarship, for if the impact of scholarship is minor among other scholars, that impact is virtually nil on publics, civic organizations, media industries, and policy-makers. Indeed, practicing journalists have long ignored, if they have not ridiculed, academic media research and rarely read such journals.

Journal Structures and Processes

Many of the newer journals developed from the inability of scholars doing research that was new and innovative in theory, topic, or method (feminism is an example) to find appropriate outlets and audiences in the 1970s and 1980s. More recently, the motive to create journals seems primarily financial. Most journals in journalism and media studies are published by a few large commercial (i.e., not university) companies that enjoy economies of scale. Taylor & Francis, part of Routledge, publishes 24 communication-related journals, including all nine journals sponsored by the National Communication Association (NCA). Blackwell, which merged with John Wiley in 2007, publishes some journals of the International Communication Association (ICA), including its flagship quarterly, Journal of Communication. The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) publishes its own three association-wide journals, including its flagship, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly. Members receive all three, whether they read them or not. In contrast, AEJMC divisions use commercial publishing companies for their journals. A few universities produce their own journals, edited by their own faculty, though few are likely to earn profit or prestige. SAGE Publications produces 11 mass communications journals, and more were added in 2008. Like SAGE, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates (taken over by Taylor & Francis in 2007) has a heavy focus on communication, and publishes at least 15 relevant journals (on media ethics, religion, economics, public relations, and visual communication). Quarterly journals tend to cost $50 to $80 a year for U.S. individuals; unlike subscription prices in many social sciences, the society-published journal prices are not significantly less than commercial publishers.' Relationships with commercial publishers lessen the technical and financial responsibilities of the association and editors. But some authors complain about the policies of some commercial publishers—such as that the sole payment to authors for publishing in Taylor & Francis journals is free online access to their own article and a single copy of the issue in which it appears.

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