Towards a new relevance: Why the new media landscape requires journalists and media scholars to forge a genuine partnership for the first time

There is no denying the wide gap that separates the media and journalism as an industry and the media and journalism as an academic discipline. The industry, facing inexorable and inexhaustible challenges from the digital world and the social web, rarely builds on academic work. Practitioners say academic research is not specifically written for them. While acknowledging the credibility and worthiness of academic research, they at the same time find its language and style strange and difficult to comprehend. In this article, Matthew Eltringham, executive editor at the BBC’s College of Journalism, charts a path on how to bridge this ‘regrettable’ gap. He calls for a ‘genuine partnership’ through which both sides can work together to help practitioners address the problems that are disrupting the industry. The author cites examples of how a few academics have preserved the rigour of scientific research and at the same time made their work ‘practical, relevant and useful’ to the industry.