f Media academics versus media practitioners: Who gets it right?

This note focuses on the deliberations from a two-day international conference at Sweden’s Jönköping University in October 2013. The theme was ‘Towards a praxis-based media and journalism research’. The conference dwelt on the epistemological and methodological underpinnings to which the Journal of Applied Journalism and Media Studies (AJMS) adheres, particularly its applied or praxis niche. The note starts with a short background and then considers the major concerns voiced by practitioners attending the conference about much of the research media academics carry out. It then presents a synopsis of the response of the participants to two major questions: (1) Why do media practitioners generally discard or not trust findings by media scholars? (2) Are media scholars under any obligation to relate their theories to practice? It ends with the lessons that academics can draw from the way practitioners view their world and assess their research.