ИСТИНА

To start debating the challenging question posed by the conference on “how we – educators in journalism and communication identify ourselves: as serving the profession or creating changes and innovation through research” we firstly should study what is going on in a research segment in academia, simply to study what is studied. Presentation will introduce the results of the survey which examines panorama of journalism education research performed in universities and other high educational institutions – members of European Journalism Training Association. The project was driven by the idea for better understanding the research that EJTA member schools do on improving journalism education, and identified the potential of this organization to enable collaboration and develop joint projects, share ideas, and build research alliances. The collected data determines scale, geography, objects, and methods of the ongoing research projects, helps understand how results are disseminated, and identify names of contributors – academicians and research teams. Results have been obtained by performing an online questionnaire. Because the questionnaire was launched by the auspices of European Journalism Training Association (EJTA) the selection of schools with journalism education programs was limited by a number of the EJTA members, all in all 57 institutions. Eight research questions framed the survey and helped formulate conclusions on what kind of research do European journalism educators perform for innovating profession: which European EJTA members schools/universities are involved with directly related to journalism education research; how many current or past journalism education projects schools conduct; what are the topics of discovered research projects; what methods are used, and what are the samples and scales; what is the impact on the educational process; who are the main researchers; where the results are disseminated; what are the titles of open source reports, articles or publications. As a result we got a catalogue which like a starting point helps to draw possible answers to the question posed by the conference and name schools (from the sample) that could be assumed as genuine “innovators” in media education.