ECREA’s Journalism Studies (JS) held a meeting today in ECC. The most important take-aways of the meeting are summarized below.

1. New website

– and a whole new look. Sleek, modern and visual. JS already has new Twitter and Facebook accounts, but they are not yet in use. Also, the new website will not be hosted by Ecrea.

2. Conference statistics

In ECC 2014, the journalism section had the biggest number of abstract seeking for presentation – 168.
The acceptance percentage was 56, so all in all 82 presentations were approved. The acceptance percentage of panels was 50%, three out of 6 proposed panels were accepted.

Problems with the conferences have been as follows: cancellations, submissions after the official deadline, no proper panel allocation during the planning stage, review sheet refereed to wrong conference theme, submission handling has been difficult and the system lacking (did not generate overall scores, review outcome not always communicated) …

3. The next conferences.. ?

Biennial conference will be held 5. – 6 Feb 2015 in Zürich, Switzerland.
Where will the next “half” conference be held in 2017? Nobody knows yet.

4. Reaching out

The chair of the section Thomas Hanitzsch seemed to be slightly sceptical towards to new ECREA section Journalism and Communication Education. Hanitzsch feels that Journalism Studies -group includes the theme of education. However, he aims to reach across and eg. organize conferece sessions together with the new group.

He also mentioned that more Scandinavian co-operation would be welcome.