Clifford Christians receives AEJMC’s Eleanor Blum Distinguished Service to Research Award
Clifford Christians, research professor emeritus of communications, and professor emeritus of media studies and of journalism, will receive the 2024 Eleanor Blum Distinguished Service to Research Award from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. The award will be presented at AEJMC’s 107th annual conference in Philadelphia this August.
"I am convinced that Dr. Christians should get credit for creating, leading, and developing the entire subfield of media and journalism ethics, not just in the United States, but in the world. At the least, without his work and his inspiration, media ethics would be entirely impoverished and thin," said Linda Steiner (PhD ’79, ICR), editor of Journalism & Communication Monographs.
The Blum Distinguished Service to Research Award was created to recognize people who have devoted substantial parts of their careers to promoting research in mass communication, and those who have spent much of their professional lives to mentoring students in areas of research. It is named in honor of the first recipient, Eleanor Blum, a long-time communications librarian at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Christians (PhD ’74, ICR) is a former director of the Institute of Communications Research at the College of Media and chair of the doctoral program in communications, positions he held from 1987-2001 and from 2007-2009.
The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication is a nonprofit, educational association of journalism and mass communication educators, students, and media professionals. AEJMC’s mission is to promote the highest possible standards for journalism and mass communication education, to cultivate 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 and a better informed public.