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Journalism, B.A.

Program Mission

As journalists we are concerned with stories — who tells them about whom, how they are told, how they arrive at an audience, and what happens to them when they become “public.” Journalism at LMU connects the educational values of the Jesuit and Marymount traditions to the rapidly changing future of global communication. Our program directly engages LMU’s mission of the promotion of justice by critiquing media representations and their immediate social and political impact, and by exploring the history of community journalism. Journalism at LMU is not merely theoretical; we offer hands-on instruction in the reporting, writing, editing, and technological skills across multiple platforms that students need to become professional journalists.

The Journalism Department has as its pedagogical foundation the hands-on approach of project-based learning, which connects our students to communities and lives whose stories transmit issues of social, political, cultural, and moral import. It is also rigorously interdisciplinary, incorporating instruction in video, photography, and audio production; communication studies; digital media; social media; and more. Ethical discussions suffuse the entire curriculum, both in the traditional sense of a basic professional ethics and also in the larger frame of an ethics of representation — who is reporting about whom, and why and how. Telling people’s stories is our mission.