Publish and Perish—The Academic Journalist’s Publishing Dilemma

Abstract

Universities have fully developed requirements on how to assess full-time faculty, especially PhDs. However, these are not fully sensitive to evaluating ‘production’ faculty and/or ‘craft practitioners’ such as in journalism schools. In this opinion piece, the author explores the question of whether journalistic writings can or should be ‘recognised’ as academic research output? While arguing that journalistic writing can be recognized as academic research output, he points out that good journalism involves research, originality, social responsibility and ethics, and good journalists are flag bearers of these standards. These are analogous, if not similar, to expectations of good scholarship and hence journalistic writing merits the same acceptance as other academic ‘theoretical’ writing.