Sessions outline moving from newsroom to classroom

Quill, The, Sep/Oct 2009

Even as they received advice for moving from the newsroom to the classroom at the 2009 Convention, a new study suggests journalists may have an even harder time making that happen.

Often, professional journalists begin teaching part-time or as adjunct faculty. But the latest data on journalism faculty hiring show the number of those positions continued to decline in 2008 - 4,979, down from 5,341 a year earlier.

The only positive news in the journalism faculty hiring picture in the 2008 Annual Survey of Journalism and Mass Communication Enrollments was the fact that full-time faculty hiring increased slightly, even though 40 percent of J-schools were under some type of hiring freeze. The survey was released by the University of Georgia's James Cox Center for Mass Communication Training and Research.

The new data on journalism faculty hiring came out just three weeks before two sessions focused on making the transition from full-time journalism to academe were held at the 2009 Convention.

For more on these sessions and the full story, see spj.org/quill.asp.