What Is Journalism Studies and Science Communication? Fields, Methods, and Funding

Journalism studies is the academic field that studies news and the people, institutions, technologies, and audiences that produce and consume it — how news is made, what it does to the people who encounter it, who is free to report it, and how that is changing as reporting moves onto digital platforms. Science communication is a neighboring field that studies how scientific knowledge, uncertainty, and evidence travel from researchers to non-specialist audiences, including through the news media. The two overlap wherever a research finding becomes a news story, which is why this guide treats them together. It covers what journalism studies is, how it differs from journalism the profession and from communication studies as a whole, its main subfields and methods, how science journalism and the research-publication system interact (embargoes, press releases, preprints), the societies, journals, and funders that support the work, and where research administrators meet it in practice.

What journalism studies is

Journalism studies treats journalism as an object of research rather than a craft to be taught. A reporter files a story; a journalism-studies researcher asks why that story was assigned, who was quoted, what the newsroom’s routines and economics shaped, how audiences read it, and whether it affected what people believed or did. The field is interdisciplinary by design. It borrows theory and methods from sociology, political science, psychology, history, linguistics, and increasingly computer science, and most of its scholars sit in schools of journalism, communication, or media rather than in a single named department.

It is useful to separate three things that share a name:

• Journalism as practice — reporting, editing, and publishing news. This is a profession, taught in professional programs, and is not itself research.
• Journalism education — the teaching of those skills, with its own pedagogical research on curricula and training.
• Journalism studies — the scholarly, evidence-based study of news production, content, audiences, institutions, and effects.

Journalism studies is one branch of the wider discipline described in CASRAI’s guide to what communication studies is. That guide notes that communication scholars study journalism and news media as an object of research, while the practice of producing news is a separate professional field, and the two are often housed in the same academic unit.

Regulation draws a similar line. In the United States, the Common Rule definition of research at 45 CFR 46.102(l) deems certain scholarly and journalistic activities, such as oral history, journalism, and biography, that focus directly on the specific individuals about whom information is collected, not to be “research” for purposes of that policy. That exclusion covers the journalistic activity itself. A journalism-studies project that surveys, interviews, or experiments on people to produce generalizable knowledge is a different matter and is normally screened by an institutional review board like any other social-science study. See the dictionary entry on the Common Rule definition of research for the full text.

Major subfields and questions

Journalism studies is organized around a handful of recurring questions. Departments and journals slice them differently, but the following are the standard clusters.

News production and the sociology of newsrooms

This strand studies how news is made: how editors and reporters select stories (often called news values or gatekeeping), how routines, deadlines, sources, and ownership shape coverage, and how the economics of the news business affect what gets reported. Typical methods are newsroom ethnography, interviews with journalists, and analysis of how stories change from first draft to publication. It connects to organizational communication and the sociology of work.

News content and framing

Researchers analyze what news actually says: which topics receive attention, how events are framed, whose voices are quoted, and how coverage differs across outlets, countries, and time. Content analysis and discourse analysis dominate, increasingly supported by text-mining and machine-learning classifiers applied to large archives.

Audiences and media effects

Media-effects research asks what exposure to news does to knowledge, attitudes, trust, and behavior. Classic lines include agenda-setting (the idea that coverage shapes which issues people consider important), framing effects, and selective exposure. Experiments, panel surveys, and, more recently, analysis of platform and search data are the usual designs. Audience research also studies news avoidance, trust in media, and how people encounter news through social platforms.

Press freedom, law, and ethics

This strand examines the conditions under which journalists can work: legal protections and restrictions, safety of reporters, state and corporate pressure, and the ethical codes the profession uses to govern itself. It overlaps with political science, law, and international relations; CASRAI’s guide to international relations covers a neighboring field that frequently examines cross-border information flows and public diplomacy.

Digital, data, and computational journalism

Two related meanings are in use. As a practice, computational and data journalism means using programming, statistics, databases, and automation to find and tell stories. As a research area, it studies those practices — and the algorithms, recommendation systems, and automated content tools now embedded in news distribution — along with questions of platform power, transparency, and verification. Misinformation and disinformation research, including fact-checking effectiveness and how false claims spread, sits here and in political communication.

History and comparative journalism

Historians of journalism trace the development of the press, news agencies, broadcasting, and online media, while comparative researchers contrast media systems across countries. Historical work relies on archives and close reading rather than the quantitative methods above.

Research methods

Because the field is interdisciplinary, no single method defines it. The common toolkit includes:

• Content and discourse analysis of news text, images, and video, both manual coding and automated.
• Surveys and panel studies of audiences and of journalists themselves.
• Experiments testing how headlines, framing, corrections, or labels change comprehension and belief.
• Interviews and ethnography in newsrooms and with sources.
• Computational methods such as web scraping, network analysis, topic modeling, and large-language-model-assisted coding of large corpora.
• Legal and historical analysis for press-freedom and media-history work.

Methodological questions for any of these are covered in CASRAI’s research methods hub. Studies that collect data from people raise the usual research-ethics and data-management obligations, which matter especially when interview subjects are sources who requested confidentiality.

Computational work adds its own issues. Platforms change what data they expose, terms of service restrict scraping, and news archives may be licensed rather than open, so data-sharing plans need to account for what can legally be redistributed. These constraints are a recurring reason journalism-studies projects need early contact with the research office and the library.

Science communication and science journalism

Science communication is the broad practice and study of conveying science to audiences outside the specialist community: the public, policymakers, patients, students, and other researchers in different fields. It includes public engagement events, museum and online outreach, risk communication, and the work of university press offices. Science journalism is the subset carried out by independent reporters and editors who cover research as news, with editorial independence from the scientists and institutions they cover. That independence is the main distinction from institutional communication such as a university press release, which promotes the institution’s own research.

The research side of the field studies, among other things, how scientific uncertainty is reported, how news framing affects public understanding of science and trust in scientists, how audiences evaluate conflicting expert claims, and which outreach strategies measurably work. The well-known journals in this area include Science Communication, Public Understanding of Science, and the Journal of Science Communication. Journalism-focused venues such as Journalism Studies, Journalism Practice, Digital Journalism, and Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly publish the news-production and media-effects work described above.

Embargoes, press releases, and the publication system

The scholarly publishing system and the news system are tightly coupled, and several mechanisms sit exactly at the join:

• Press embargoes. A journal or institution gives reporters advance access to a paper on the condition that nothing is published until a set date and time. The aim is to let journalists read the work, consult independent experts, and prepare accurate coverage rather than rushing. CASRAI’s dictionary defines the press embargo in this sense. It is a different thing from a publisher’s access embargo on open-access deposit; see the general embargo entry for the distinction, and date of start of embargo for how repositories record the latter.
• Press releases. Universities, journals, and funders write releases to draw attention to results. Studies of science news repeatedly look at how closely coverage follows the release and whether claims in a release are stronger than those in the paper, so the quality of institutional communication is itself a research topic.
• Prior publication. Journals have historically worried that findings discussed publicly before peer review could count as prior publication, a concern often discussed under the label of the Ingelfinger rule. Policies on preprints and prior dissemination vary by journal and should be checked for the specific journal before findings are posted or discussed with reporters. For the manuscript-version vocabulary, see the comparison of preprint, postprint, and version of record and the preprint entry.
• Preprints and media coverage. When a preprint is covered as news before peer review, reporters and readers can mistake a provisional result for a vetted one. Good practice, which journalism-studies research on science coverage tends to support, is to label unreviewed work clearly and to seek independent comment.
• Attention metrics. News mentions are one input to altmetrics. The Altmetric Attention Score and the tools compared in PlumX vs. Altmetric count media coverage alongside social-media and policy mentions, and the study of such indicators belongs to scientometrics.

For researchers who want to communicate their own work, social media for researchers covers platform strategy, and science communication and public engagement grants explains the funding available for outreach activity.

Societies, associations, and journals

Scholars in the field organize through a small number of international associations. The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) describes itself as a nonprofit, educational association of journalism and mass communication educators, students, and media professionals. Its stated mission is to promote the highest possible standards for journalism and mass communication education, to cultivate the widest possible range of communication research, to encourage a multicultural society in the classroom and curriculum, and to defend and maintain freedom of communication. The International Communication Association (ICA) is an international scholarly association for communication researchers, and its programs span media and journalism research alongside other areas of the discipline. Science-communication researchers have their own networks, including a number of national and regional associations, and many also participate in the wider communication and science-and-technology-studies communities.

These associations run peer-reviewed conferences where much journalism-studies work first appears, and they are the usual route for finding collaborators and reviewers. Research offices supporting a faculty member should expect conference-travel and registration costs to be a recurring budget line, and should check each association’s current membership and call-for-papers terms directly rather than relying on a summary.

Funders

Funding for journalism-related research and practice is more varied than in a single-mission field.

• Knight Foundation. The foundation was founded in 1950 by John S. and James L. Knight, who built one of the largest U.S. newspaper companies, and says it works across four areas: journalism, arts and culture, community development, and information and society. It supports local journalism and community work in the 26 cities and towns where the Knight brothers once published newspapers, and its journalism and information-and-society portfolios are the ones most relevant to this field.
• National Science Foundation (NSF). NSF’s Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE) describes its remit as basic research on people and society, including the study of human behavior and social organizations, plus research infrastructure such as surveys. Journalism-studies projects with a social-science or computational angle normally find a home through SBE programs or computing programs, and applicants should confirm current program fit with a program officer, since NSF has no dedicated journalism program.
• Science communication funding. Outreach and public-engagement components are funded by NSF, UKRI, Wellcome, and others; the specifics are in CASRAI’s science communication grants guide.
• Other sources. National research councils, private foundations focused on democracy, civic information, or public health communication, and university internal seed funds also support this work. The overview of private foundation funders is a starting point for foundation prospecting.

Funder priorities shift, so check each funder’s current calls before planning a proposal.

Training and careers

Scholars of journalism and science communication usually hold a doctorate in communication, journalism, media studies, or a social science, often after professional experience as a reporter or editor. Master’s programs in science communication or science journalism train practitioners and also feed doctoral study. Early-career researchers commonly build a record through conference papers and journal articles in the venues above, and many combine scholarship with professional practice, publishing both peer-reviewed work and journalism of their own.

The research-administration link

Journalism and science-communication projects raise several administrative questions that are easy to miss:

• Human-subjects screening. Interviews with journalists and sources, audience experiments, and surveys generally need an IRB determination, even though journalism itself is not research. The 45 CFR 46.102(l) exclusion is narrow and should be applied by the institution’s reviewer, not self-certified.
• Source confidentiality and data management. Promises of anonymity to news sources need to be reflected in data-management plans and consent language, and restrict what can be shared openly.
• Data access and licensing. Platform data and licensed news archives often cannot be redistributed, which affects funder data-sharing requirements.
• Dissemination and communications. Many funders expect a public-engagement or dissemination plan. The press office, the author, and the funder should agree on release timing, particularly when a journal embargo applies.
• Open access and embargo periods. Funder open-access mandates interact with publisher embargoes; see the UKRI open access policy guide for one worked example.

Frequently asked questions

What is journalism studies?

It is the scholarly study of news: how it is produced, what it contains, who reads it, what effects it has, and the conditions of press freedom under which it is made. It is a research field, distinct from the profession of journalism.

Is journalism studies the same as communication studies?

No. Journalism studies is usually treated as one subfield of the broader communication and media-studies discipline, and the two are often taught in the same school. See the communication studies guide for the wider map, and the cultural studies guide for the critical tradition that also analyzes media.

What is the difference between science communication and science journalism?

Science communication is the umbrella: any effort to convey science to non-specialists, including outreach by researchers and institutions. Science journalism is the independent reporting of science as news by journalists who are not part of the institutions they cover.

What is a press embargo and why does it matter to researchers?

A press embargo is an agreement that reporters will not publish a story about a paper before an agreed time, giving them advance access to prepare accurate coverage. Researchers should know the embargo terms of their journal before speaking to media, since breaking them can jeopardize the publication. Not to be confused with an open-access embargo; see the press embargo entry.

Do preprints affect news coverage?

They can. A preprint covered as news has not been peer reviewed, so coverage should say so. Check the target journal’s policy on preprints and media contact before posting.

Who funds journalism research?

Sources include private foundations such as the Knight Foundation, federal agencies such as NSF’s SBE directorate for social-science and computational projects, national research councils, and universities. There is no single dedicated federal program, so applicants match projects to program scope.

Which societies should a journalism-studies researcher know?

AEJMC and the International Communication Association are the two most commonly cited, along with national and regional associations and specialist networks in science communication.