FRONTLINE: Gentle sounds, distant roar: a watershed year for journalism as research

Abstract

The Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification (ANZSRC) 2020 decision on disciplinary categories has profound implications for journalism as a research discipline. Journalism Practice and Professional Writing retain their six-digit Fields of Research (FoR) code within the Creative Arts and Writing Division, a new six-digit FoR of Journalism Studies has been created in the Division of Language, Communication and Culture, and three new FoR codes of Literature, Journalism and Professional Writing have been created for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, Māori and Pacific Peoples within the new Indigenous Studies Division. This categorisation both confirms Journalism as a sovereign and independent discipline distinct from Communication and Media Studies, which has been in bitter contention for more than two decades. The ANZSRC confirmed its 2008 policy that the sole and definitive criterion for categorisation was methodology. This article explores the welcome ramifications of this decision for Journalism within Australasian university-based journalism and charts some of the issues ahead for journalism academics as they embark on the long overdue and fraught path to disciplinary self-recognition as an equal among the humanities and social sciences.

Keywords

• ANZSRC
• Australia
• ARC
• communication
• fields of research
• FoR codes