Abstract:

This preliminary communication research article presents early results of the main activity of the international scientific project Higher education of journalists in a digital environment (HEJDE) of the Faculty of Humanities of the Juraj Dobrila University of Pula for a three-year period (2021 – 2023) directed to the research of the state, challenges and educational opportunities of the European academic education of journalists in the digital environment.

Starting from the perspective of the theory of sustainable journalism education (Vukić, 2019), the extremely rapid changes that technological development imposes on educational practices signal the necessity of introducing a new paradigm in the field of journalism education according to which not only new educational and scientific objectives are important for its development, but planning on how to support them as well. The HEJDE project key activity, supported by UNESCO, is one of such oriented ones.

Aiming to resolve the problem of lacking a central place where one can quickly and easily access updated information about the numerous study programs that educate journalists in Europe, the idea was to, in collaboration with the large international European team of diverse collaborators - researchers, teachers, journalists, managers, students, etc., create a free open access interactive digital map with all the key information about higher education study programs that educate journalists in Europe. Based on postulates of availability, accuracy, uniformity, completeness and durability, it presents data gathered with regard to geographical, institutional and programme characteristics which will be useful for different stakeholders, in particular researchers, future students, professionals and the wider public. The intention is to use the digital tool in a sustainable way, to enable the simple and controlled uploading of new data even when the project finishes.

From this online database offering different data within the same, European framework, trends can be extracted, general and national patterns noticed which can be of interest also outside Europe. Having in mind that mapped data are current, the collection would also provide an insight into the transformation which higher education institutions went through in their transition to the digital age and in particular regarding new demands coming from different media systems.

As the process of collecting and entering data has successfully started, this paper will provide an insight into the lessons learned from the first phase of this project activity. So far, several challenges have been faced in this pioneer scientific work of building an interactive digital repository of the European higher journalism education institutions and appertaining study programmes - financing, methodology, setting and operationalizing variables, developing and testing the application, finding and networking associates, tracking the process of entering data, and visibility, which will be thoroughly analyzed and discussed in this article.

Keywords:

HEJDE project, higher journalism education, interactive digital repository, mapping, study programmes, sustainable journalism education.