Public Scholarship

I40 NEW PUBLIC SCHOlARS spaces where knowledge is created in meaningful, connected, innovative, and disruptive ways. It has been 25 years since Ernest Boyer (1990) penned Scholarship Reconsidered , yet very few institutions have made the changes he called for in his provocative book. We propose that the tectonic plates are shifting so that as emerging sch.olars like us enter the academy, the question will not be if institutions change, but rather how and how fast? We welcome the opportunity to share our stories, as we believe public narratives are potentially the most powerful way to reclaim and broadcast the civic lives of the next generation of publicly engaged sch.olars. And through the sharing of our narratives, we wish to pave a path that leads to institutional transformarion, rather than passively assimilate into the prevailing ways of being, knowing, teaching, and creating within the academy. Notes 1. From the time we first wrote our narratives, some of us have moved from being a student to being a professional in the academy. For example, Cecilia is now a tenure-track faculty member at the University of Denver, and Adam is the provost of a new college. Our "new" roles do not detract from the developmental perspective we offer to the collective narrative of the next generation of community-engaged

The traditional business model of journalism is disintegrating. Meanwhile, the academy faces criticism over teaching quality and research relevance. Drawing on economics, communication, and journalism, we construct a modest proposal: that academia produce some forms of at-risk public-interest journalism, bolstering the civic mission of universities. To better understand current, realistic possibilities, our analysis also compares and contrasts academia and journalism*their economics, methods, cultures, and norms*and their respective weaknesses, accessibility, and complexity, to determine which journalistic public goods could conceivably be created in academia. We suggest criteria and examples for how academic journalism could address institutional weaknesses by producing investigations and analyses of complex problems, accessibly communicated. Precedents, barriers, and further implications are charted.

While newsmaking is regularly debated within criminology, few studies have examined why criminologists make news media appearances and how often they do so. Drawing on a dataset of 1,211 survey responses and 27 interviews, our study examines these issues, investigating the frequency, predictors, and motivations of newsmaking criminology among scholars in seven countries: the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and South Africa. Our findings indicate that gender and career stage are key predictors of criminologists appearing in at least once in news media, along with the desire to publicise research, demonstrate research impact, generate university publicity, and influence policy and legal reform. Our interview data reveal two central logics informing these predictors: an industrial logic responsive to the demands of academic capitalism, and a social logic informing scholars’ beliefs on the public role of criminologists and criminological research. On the one hand, our participants’ newsmaking practices were driven by moral-political motivations to dispel ‘crime news’ myths and promote evidence-based criminal justice policies. On the other, they were often also influenced by the imperatives of academic capitalism to promote tertiary education, measure research impact, and participate in competitive employment markets.

Recently, the debate about the external perception and relevance of media and communication science has gained momentum. Many researchers criticise that the discipline does not engage sufficiently in public debates and is hardly visible in news media. They consider current developments in media and society—including the rise of online and social media as well as changes in political communication, news use, news quality, and journalistic autonomy—as a largely missed opportunity to increase the relevance and societal contribution of media and communication science. This comes at a time when the relationship between science and society is changing, with scientists, disciplines, and higher education institutions being increasingly called upon to engage in public discourse and with various publics.

This ongoing debate is important for stimulating self-reflection and sharpening the identity of the discipline. But while numerous diagnoses lament the discipline’s alleged lack of public visibility and societal contributions, studies assessing these aspects empirically are still scarce. In particular, there is a lack of studies measuring the media visibility of media and communication science over a longer period of time. The study at hand therefore presents the results of a longitudinal automated content analysis of the news media visibility and the thematic contextualisation of media and communication science in Swiss print media. Based on an analysis of the entire coverage of seven national newspapers between 1999 and 2018—including quality daily newspapers, weekly newspapers and magazines as well as tabloids—we analysed and compared the visibility of media and communication science with the related disciplines of political science and sociology. In addition, we examined the reporting on media and communication science in depth by using Topic Modeling with Latent Dirichlet Allocation.

Our study shows that the public visibility of media and communication science (n = 1843) is clearly lagging behind that of political science (n = 7013) and sociology (n = 9678). Moreover, the latter have continued to increase their media visibility while that of media and communication science has stagnated at a lower level. After years of a moderate downward trend, the visibility of media and communication science has only been slowly rising again since 2016. The differences between the disciplines can hardly be explained by their size or growth. While political science is one of the largest social sciences in Switzerland and has a higher, and growing, number of students, sociology is a smaller field compared to media and communication science. Yet it is sociology which has the highest media visibility, with a further increase in recent years. In contrast, the media visibility of media and communication science has been rather low for the past 20 years, although departments at Swiss universities have expanded considerably during this time.

In Swiss media, the topical contexts in which media and communication science is most frequently mentioned are trends of newspaper circulation, the role of the discipline in higher education as well as media policy, media regulation and public service broadcasting. In the last few years, the latter topic has gained importance, indicating that communication scientists contributed to the recent debate on the societal role and funding of Swiss public broadcasting. Surprisingly, media and communication science is rarely mentioned in the context of digital media and digitisation—and the mentions in this thematic context do not increase over time.

Overall, the study suggests that media and communication science is indeed “largely irrelevant” in important public discussions. Thus, measures to strengthen the visibility of media and communication science are needed, not at least because the Swiss public expects scientists to share and discuss their findings in ongoing public debates. Moreover, we argue that the regular analysis of the public visibility of media and communication science would be an important contribution for the further development of the field—in Switzerland and beyond. While we focused on print media, future studies should also address the visibility of media and communication science in broadcasting media, online news, blogs, and social media as well as contributions to commissions and public events.