COMPLETION REPORTMr.Jeremaiah Manuel Opiniano
Coodinator/Research Associate
Dept. of Communication and Media Studies
Faculty of Arts and Letters
University of Santo Tomas

The grantee was able to finish the study titled Roles and Purposes of Graduate Journalism Education in theLens of Global Journalism: A Phenomenology. The researcher interviewed 16 graduate students from Japan’s
Waseda University (11) and the Philippines’ Ateneo de Manila University (2) and the Asian Institute of Journalism
and Communication (3). Also interviewed were the master’s in journalism program heads. The researcher sought
to find out from Japanese and Filipino graduate journalism students the roles and purposes of journalism graduate
studies on them, with phenomenology as its research design.
An output of the paper, given the answers of the respondents, is the formulation of a Bridge of Traits ofGraduate Journalism Education. Students find their graduate studies in journalism as: a) Insights maker; 2)Context provider; 3) Role agent; 4) Capacity builder; and 5) Individual booster. The paper is a response to thedearth of studies worldwide on graduate journalism education —remarked to be a venue to “retrain journalists”(Folkerts, 2014) and to make practicing journalists become practitioner-scholars.
A struggle faced by this paper is to get practicing journalists to be respondents, especially in the Philippines.
Personal contacts have been exhausted but the busy work of daily journalists is a constraint to make them
respondents. A target journalism school in Japan, Nihon University, did not provide any feedback on theresearcher’s request for respondents and for the school’s participation. Nevertheless, having 16 respondents for thisphenomenological research satisfies the methodological rigors of the said qualitative research design.
The research project contributes to studies worldwide on graduate journalism education. At the moment, somescholars (Folkerts, Lemann and Hamilton, 2013; Folkerts, 2014; Schultz, 2022) have put demarcation lines on thedifference between undergraduate and graduate journalism education. Answers from the 16 respondents tend toshow the operationability of the visions to graduate journalism education, from students’ point of view.

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Publication of the Results of Research Project:
Verbal Presentation (Date, Venue, Name of Conference, Title of Presentation, Presenter, etc.)
Accepted for presentation at the 2016 World Journalism Education Congress (WJEC), slated 14-16 July in
Auckland, New Zealand (see attached abstract acceptance letter).
Thesis / Research (Name of Journal and its Date, Title and Author of Thesis, etc.)
The paper was also first printed as a working paper by the University of Santo Tomas Journalism program (USTJournalism Working Papers Series 2015-3). This working paper has its electronic version, while a printedversion (as of this writing) is currently being printed.
This paper will be targeted for submission to an international journal, either Journalism Practice (Taylor andFrancis) or Journal of Applied Journalism and Media Studies. This submission will be done after the 2016
World Journalism Education Congress (WJEC), where journalism educators/scholars/practitioners willcomment on the said work.
Book (Publisher and Date of the Book, Title and Author of the Book, etc.)
N/A

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