Happy Birthday AEJMC!

The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) officially turned 100 on November 30, 2012.  As the celebration of AEJMC’s centennial continues, Ball State’s Department of Journalism joined in the excitement with a birthday cake as hundreds of other colleges and universities are planning similar celebrations.

AEJMC is a nonprofit organization of more than 3,700 educators, students and practitioners from around the globe.  Founded in 1912, by Willard Grosvenor Bleyer, the first president (1912-13) of the American Association of Teachers of Journalism, as it was then known, AEJMC is the oldest and largest alliance of journalism and mass communication educators and administrators at the college level.

Faculty and students celebrate AEJMC’s 100th Birthday.

AEJMC’s mission is to promote the highest possible standards for journalism and mass communication education, to encourage the widest possible range of communication research, to encourage the implementation of a multi-cultural society in the classroom and curriculum, and to defend and maintain freedom of communication in an effort to achieve better professional practice, a better informed public, and wider human understanding.

AEJMC holds an annual conference in August, featuring sessions on teaching, research and public service in the various components of journalism and mass communication — from advertising and public relations to electronic and online journalism to media management and newspapers.  Pre-convention workshops deal with teaching advertising, media ethics issues, incorporating diversity in the curriculum, teaching media management, and teaching visual communication.