How do you do?, this is Yu Nitobe from Department of Sport Intelligence and Mass Media(SIM) at Sendai University. It has been getting colder than last week. Please take care of yourself. By the way, do you know the word "journalism"? today, I would like to introduce "what is journalism" to you. Mrs. Lin!! Please introduce about it.
Hi, this is Lin from Department of SIM. It's my second year teaching here and my specialty is Mass media and Journalism Studies. Today I would like to share with you some of my thoughts about "journalism".
To most Japanese students, the word "Journalism" (or "press") might sound unfamiliar and foreign because it is not a word they frequently use in daily conversations. Even for those who are aware of what it means, they sometimes answer that it is of the same meaning with "mass media". Moreover, people usually think of it as a jargon only understood among mass media companies. However, what I want to emphasize here is, journalism, as a social activity, is neither only a job at mass media companies nor a consumer goods. It is an activity which used to play an important role in the process of democratization, and now is still essential to our society and daily lives. Journalism carries an important task to keep a society work in a democratic system, and to avoid any autocratic decisions.
Before sharing with you my thoughts on "journalism", I want to define it in a broad sense that it is "an activity of recording/reporting/explaining social issues by anyone in a society". By defining journalism this way, we will find that it is not only the employees at mass media companies who can be called journalists, people who regularly record/report/explain issues happening around them can be potential journalists as well. Especially with the drastic development of information and computer technologies in recent years, people using blogs, web news sites or email networks to report news are increasing and they all can be called journalists as long as what they write are based on facts and rational discussions.
Therefore, journalism is not an activity which is only limited to some special skilled reporters but is a practice to be carried out by members of the society to discover social problems, reporting and bringing them people's attention. The area journalism mostly covers include sports, politics, culture, economics and international/local affairs, but there still have more areas needed to be discovered and reported from an alternative perspective.
[the editor's postscript]
Everyone, did you understand "journalism"? If you are interested in "journalism", Department of SIM supports all of you!
Thank you.
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仙台大学スポーツ情報マスメディア研究所
Institute of Sport Intelligence & Massmedia (ISIM）
TEL：0224-55-1045(内：656）
Mail：isim2008@scn.ac.jp
H P：http://www.sendaidaigaku.jp/
