Journalistic higher education: the metamorphosis of professional skills [Articol]

Abstract

There is an impressive number of journalistic university training models in the world, but all of them, regardless of their specifics, focus on the formation of two types of professional skills: general and specific. The general professional competences are in correlation with the contemporary trends of the development of the society and are meant to respond to the rising demands of the journalist to have a vast general knowledge. The specific competencies depend on the contemporary development trends of the media field and aim to satisfy the imperatives related to the application of journalistic pre-production, production and post-production tools, as well as the examination, through the means of science, of the media field. The structured sets of knowledge and skills assimilated by future journalists around the world vary from one culture to another, from one country to another, from one historical period to another. These variations are designed according to the socio-political and economic realities in which the teaching process takes place, as well as the traditions existing in higher education in the respective environments. At the same time, they also appear due to the different understanding, on the one hand, due to the social mission of the media and the journalist’s role within the society, on the other hand, the professional culture of journalists in general and the minimum professionalism. Therefore, the conceptual transfiguration of professional skills is due to a series of intra- and extra-media factors that define the framework for the development of higher education in journalism and highlight the differences between university training processes organized in different education systems.