Journalism Education in the Age of Convergence: Pedagogical and Scholastic Shifts in the Media Departments of Hyderabad

Abstract

The rapid growth in the field of journalism and mass communication education worldwide is second only to the burgeoning of engineering institutions and B-schools [1]. This also holds true in the Indian scenario, where a study by the Delhi-based Centre for Media Studies reports that there are over 300 media institutes in India offering a wide range of technical and creative programmes with diverse course content [2]. This phenomenal growth must be seen in the context of the manifold expansion of the media market since the economic liberalisation of the 1990s and the ongoing transformations brought about by digital technologies and convergence. Yet the discipline that services this market has no adequately documented Indian history: existing accounts of communication study are largely Western in orientation and, even there, have been criticised as hagiographic and Whiggish. Digital interventions through convergence have meanwhile changed the way journalism is taught as well as understood: skills training is no longer confined to a single technology, reporting is now done simultaneously for multiple platforms, and pedagogy is increasingly focussed on developing multi-skilled students, while media research incorporates techniques such as social media ethnography [3]. Situated within the frameworks of disciplinary historiography and institutional isomorphism, this paper analyses the evolution of journalism education in Hyderabad through a study of two prominent media departments—the Department of Communication and Journalism at Osmania University, founded in 1954 as one of the earliest in the country, and the Department of Communication at the University of Hyderabad, established in 1988–89. Drawing on in-depth interviews with three established academics whose own biographies embody the discipline’s founding lineages, together with a historical perusal of its growth over more than 75 years, the paper examines how journalism curricula have responded to the advent of the digital era, whether educators have had to change their approaches to teaching and research in the age of media convergence, and what the discipline’s many renamings reveal about its constant negotiation with market forces and technology.