Abstract

The accelerated globalization of media and its increasingly participatory possibilities in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as a result of technological advances has raised pertinent questions regarding the definition of journalism and journalists. In an era where media have become “environmental” to the extent that the world is becoming a “mediapolis,” (Silverstone, 2007), the task of empirically and normatively defining “who is a journalist”; “what is journalism” (cf. Wyatt, 2007); deciding what is meant by journalism studies education (Fröhlich & Holtz-Bacha, 2003; Murray & Moore, 2003) and how it could be researched (see Löffelholz & Weaver, 2008) has become urgent—even while there is not agreement on evidence pointing to the relative “newness” of the current epoch of media globalization (Sparks, 2007).