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Carleton's Catherine McKercher and Vincent Mosco Receive Professional Freedom and Responsibility Award
[February 13, 2014]

Carleton's Catherine McKercher and Vincent Mosco Receive Professional Freedom and Responsibility Award


(Targeted News Service Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) OTTAWA, Ontario, Feb. 12 -- Carleton University issued the following news release: Retiring Carleton University journalism professor, Catherine McKercher, and former faculty member Vincent Mosco have been named joint recipients of this year's Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) Professional Freedom and Responsibility award. McKercher and Mosco, who have been married for 34 years, received the award "for their courage, persistence or brilliance in upholding professional freedom and responsibility." The award will be given at the AEJMC annual conference in Montreal, held between Aug. 6 and 9, 2014.

The award honours McKercher and Mosco individually and jointly for their work as media practitioners, scholars and critics. While McKercher is a former journalist who has taught at Carleton for many years, and Mosco is currently a researcher studying media and new communications technologies at Queen's University, they have done research together on labour and media industries that resulted in a variety of books and journal articles.

"We were thrilled, delighted and humbled to in be in the company we're in," said McKercher. "The past recipients of the award are an impressive group of people, and we're absolutely delighted to be a part of that group." McKercher and Mosco are indeed in good company. Previous recipients of this award included I.F. Stone, Noam Chomsky, James Carey, Studs Terkel, Bill Moyers, Molly Ivins, Christopher Hitchens and a host of others.


This award comes from the Cultural and Critical Studies Division of the AEJMC, which encourages humanistic, interdisciplinary research into communication. The division was created in 1979.

McKercher holds a BA from Carleton, an MJ from Temple University in Philadelphia and a PhD in Humanities from Concordia University in Montreal. She joined the faculty of the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton in 1987.

Her journalism career dates to 1970, when she worked as a summer student at the Ottawa Journal. She worked there full-time in 1973 and 1974, and moved to The Canadian Press in 1975 as a copy editor and Ontario legislature reporter in the Toronto bureau, then as a Washington correspondent from 1977-'80. From 1984-'87 she was assistant city editor at The Whig-Standard in Kingston, Ont. As a journalism educator, she is well known for The Canadian Reporter: News Writing and Reporting, the first major Canadian reporting textbook. The book, co-authored with retired colleague Carman Cumming, came out in 1993. It is now in its third edition. She is also the author of Newsworkers Unite: Labor, Convergence and North American Newspapers, which looks at how labour unions representing media workers have reconstituted themselves in the information age, Mosco was a Carleton professor from 1989 until 2003. While at Carleton, he was tasked with helping to develop Carleton's PhD in Communication. In 1996, he published The Political Economy of Communications, for which he is most known in the field. A second edition was published in 2009. He is now a Professor Emeritus at Queen's and is formerly Canada Research Chair in Communication and Society and Professor of Sociology. He graduated from Georgetown University in 1970 and received his PhD in Sociology from Harvard University in 1975. His latest book, To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World, will be published in May. It casts a critical eye on the latest trends in information technology.

McKercher and Mosco have a long-standing shared interest in communications and information workers and in the organizations that represent them, including trade unions. With the help of two SSHRC grants, they have written and edited numerous books, articles and journal special editions on communication and information workers, from call centre workers to software engineers, from journalists to Hollywood actors, in Canada and around the world. Their work has encouraged and assisted younger scholars to take up labour as an object of study and analysis.

About the AEJMC: The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) is a non-profit 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.

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.

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