Dear colleague,

Welcome to the website of the Journalism Studies Division of the International Communication Association. The division started out in 2004 when 50 ICA members petitioned for interest group status. Only two years later Journalism Studies was granted full status as a Division by the ICA Executive Committee at the 2006 meeting in Dresden, Germany. With more than 300 members, it is one of the largest divisions of ICA, and also one of the most diverse, with nearly half its members coming from outside the United States. This diversity is reflected even in the professional breadth of our membership, with members representing every state of professional development, from graduate students to senior scholars. It would seem, after all, that a forum for scholarship focusing specifically on journalism was just waiting to happen.

I am proud and honored to be the first permanent chair of the Division, which owes its existence to the tireless hard work of Thomas Hanitzsch, who founded the group, planned its first conferences and sweated all the details necessary for it to become a division.

The overall purpose of the Interest Group is to promote journalism theory and research as well as professional education in journalism. The group invites a wide array of theoretical, epistemological, and methodological approaches, all united around an interest in journalism and a desire to enhance existing understandings of how journalism works across temporal and geographic contexts. Journalism studies cuts across traditional academic boundaries, and this Division places particular emphasis on the interdisciplinary nature of the field. The scope of this charge is both exciting and challenging. If the Division can accomplish this goal it will be unique, not just to ICA, but to the communication research generally. And importance of this task ought not be understated; the Division is positioned to focus on journalism as a unique ontology and confront deep and complex problems at a time when the profession needs them most.

John Newhagen
Philip Merrill College of Journalism
at the University of Maryland