UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — A dissertation by a graduate of the University of Iowa’s mass communications program earned this year’s Penn State Davis Ethics Award, which annually recognizes the best ethics-related dissertation successfully defended each year in the fields of communication and media.
Patrick R. Johnson, an assistant professor in the Diedrich College of Communication at Marquette University, earned the award for his dissertation, titled “A News Literate Journalism: Building a More Sustainable Future for Journalism Practice and Education with News Literacy.” His adviser at Iowa was Professor Melissa Tully.
Johnson’s dissertation explores the role of journalism education to better understand journalists’ news literacy, how it is enacted in journalism practice and how it is talked about as a journalistic norm. He identifies education to help solve journalism’s crisis of relevance and build a more responsive, self-aware and diverse journalism through news literacy.
His mixed methodology, involving a survey of 238 journalists and interviews with 87 of them, concludes by promoting the concept of “News Literate Journalism” in which working journalists are better able to transcend mechanics of news content production and more fully contemplate the implicit processes and values that drive their work. Doing so, he argues, will “help illuminate a pathway to a more responsible, sustainable, and trusted institution.”
“This study provided a glimpse at the news literacy level of journalists, learning that they are not, in fact, 100% news literate,” Johnson concludes. “While they are much more literate of the news than the audiences they serve, there are opportunities to continue this vein of research to find ways to provide interventions for journalists to increase their news literacy and integrate more news literate practices.”
“Dr. Johnson’s dissertation provides a novel approach in journalism literacy scholarship and calls for a more comprehensive effort for journalists to acknowledge and strengthen the connection between their role as public educators and their professional ethics,” said Patrick Plaisance, the Don Davis Professor of Ethics at Penn State, who leads the Davis Ethics Award effort.
This is the fifth year for the Davis Award. It provides a $1,000 honorarium and a fully supported future guest-lecture visit to the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State. Johnson also is given a presentation slot on the program of the Media Ethics Division at the annual conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication in August.