Abstract:

Journalism education as we know it has its roots in the United States, during the late 19th century, when some universities started to discuss how journalism should be taught. Throughout the 20th century, journalism education became widespread through higher education institutions around the world. However, teaching aspiring journalists still places epistemological challenges, some of which cannot be detached from the future of journalism itself. The primordial tension in journalism education has never been solved. There is a perennial struggle between the practical and theoretical dimensions, followed by the need to define what should be the epistemological domain of the syllabus. More recently, the crisis of journalism, the new consumption habits of information and the global disinformation also place an important conundrum to the universities. How should journalism education be in the post-truth era? This cannot be answered without also questioning the relevance of studying social sciences and humanities in today’s society.

The Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Coimbra has tried to address these problems by developing a multidisciplinary model that promotes a particularly diverse and personalized curriculum in journalism education. In this paper we analyse this specific case and compare it with other models that are adopted and developed around the world. Through the analysis of the documents that define the educational models’ matrices, we will mobilize a methodological approach of qualitative content analysis. This empirical study is also the motive for a reflection on the challenges that journalism education has to overcome today in order to maintain its relevance in the post-truth era.

Keywords:

Journalism education, post-truth, Portugal, Higher Education.