The Journalism Department’s mission is to provide a superlative education in the best practices and principles of journalism and public relations. We seek to demonstrate excellence in the classroom, maintain an innovative and flexible curriculum, contribute top-tier scholarly research and creative work to our field and pursue community and interdisciplinary partnerships locally, nationally and internationally. We serve a diverse student body of nearly 400 majors and welcome multiple backgrounds, perspectives, experiences and approaches to practicing and studying journalism and public relations.
We believe that democracy requires a free press and access to good information to function well. We want our students to tell the stories of their communities bravely, ethically and creatively; to graduate as literate consumers of news and information; to be good writers and nimble multimedia communicators; to play a role in ensuring the dissemination of ideas that advance the public good; and to be thoughtful in their use of the systems of the digital age.
Our department is made up of faculty who have won multiple awards for their teaching, research, professional work and community outreach. We are serious about taking a student-centered approach to our work, and the results speak for themselves: Our department routinely receives many of the highest scores in student satisfaction within the College of Social & Behavioral Sciences and is in the top tier of UMass as a whole. The vast majority of our graduates are able to find work shortly after graduation, both in our core industries of journalism and public relations as well as beyond it.