Understanding a rapidly changing news and entertainment media and its relationship to democratic society is a vital task for social science. The measured excellence and critical mass of the research at Cardiff University’s School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies provides an excellent environment for Doctoral students to develop, and the pathway has an important and distinctive contribution to make in preparing the next generation of the best social scientists.

The Journalism and Democracy pathway draws upon a breadth and depth of scholarship, which includes such areas as:

• citizen journalism;
• children’s information and communication rights;
• global media monitoring that examines representations of women in the news;
• community journalism in Wales;
• digital media;
• emotionality in the news;
• impartiality in the news;
• environmental news;
• global war, conflict and crises;
• journalism, democracy and citizenship;
• journalism and human rights;
• journalism safety;
• news and the financial crisis;
• news reporting of politics in Wales, UK, and EU;
• photojournalism;
• racism, race and religion in the media;
• the role of media in ‘right to die’ debates;
• science journalism;
• social media and political activism; and
• challenges facing the media and creative industries in Wales and across the UK.

Students on the ‘1+3’ route complete the specialist module Critical Approaches to Journalism and Democracy as part of the broad interdisciplinary Social Science Research Methods Masters programme. We also offer, as part of both the ‘1+3’ and ‘+3’ routes, additional opportunities to extend training in respect quantitative and qualitative approaches in journalism research, including: survey design, questionnaires, content analysis, critical discourse analysis, framing analysis, ideological textual analysis, ethnography, audience reception analysis, in-depth interviews, focus groups, historical and archival research, policy analysis, critical textual analysis, visual analysis, and theory development. Our established bi-annual international Future of Journalism conference will provides students with an important platform for their research and with the opportunity to network with an international group of established scholars in the field.