Envisioning a More Inclusive Future for Digital Journalism: A Diversity Audit of Journalism Studies (2013–2021)

Abstract

Recent years have seen an increasing amount of self-reflective discussion among media and communication scholars, about the hegemonic structures and inclusive participation within the field. In the scholarly community of journalism studies, similar reflections have emerged in recent years. Digital Journalism has also been actively pursuing a diverse and equitable scholarship in its journal. As part of the 10th anniversary issue of Digital Journalism, this article offers a systematic diagnosis of the diversity within published journalism scholarship between 2013 and 2021. In total, 3068 publications from a group of five journalism journals—Digital Journalism, Journalism, Journalism Studies, Journalism Practice, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly—were analysed. The operationalisation of ‘diversity’ focuses on both the authorship and content levels. Findings from this study suggest that (1) Digital Journalism published research papers mostly from and on the Global North, (2) the gender distribution of corresponding authors in the journal is slightly less balanced than the group average, (3) the methodological approaches employed in Digital Journalism are more asymmetric towards quantitative and computational approaches in comparison to the group average. Based on the empirical evidence, this article makes several recommendations to Digital Journalism, and to the field at large, to achieve better equity and inclusiveness.