As a professional career, journalism or media industry calls for aspiring journalists to build a professional and highly praised industry. Journalistic ideals were the aspirations for people to choose media as their career and the criteria for journalists to produce high-quality work, which are of great importance in career planning and news making. However, with the wide application of digital media technology such as social media and mobile Internet, everyone can produce “news” anytime as they like, accompanied by the fragment information and distracted attention. Journalism professional boundaries were erased by citizen journalists, followed by the declined turnover and less aspiration for journalism students to become journalists, which lead to a vicious circle of industry development. Journalistic ideals changed with the times. To meet the industry crisis, most journalism schools pay more attention to new technologies and ignore the training of traditional journalism such as journalistic ideals. What’s more, in modern life, many journalists feel it a shame of talking his journalistic ideals in a restricted profession and a rapidly changing society. Related to this problem are the declining quality of news and the asymmetry between journalism training and the reality on the ground.
Considering this, this paper aims at JOURNALISTIC IDEALS and THEIR TRAINING in the era of digital media, uses Content Analysis to find the mechanism of journalistic ideals through the analysis of 100 contents of some important journalism awards acceptance speech and letters of demission written by some famous journalists; observed two journalism Classes in China and UK to find the present training method and interviewed with 20 journalists, 20 journalism students and 20 journalism scholars in the two countries to find the current situation of journalism ideals and their training both in reality and in expectation; this paper also uses philosophical speculation method to find the true meaning and the mechanisms of journalistic ideals and the theoretical model of their training. All the research are focus on the following questions: What’s the relationship between journalism ideals and digital technology? What are journalistic ideals and their mechanisms in the digital media era? How can we inculcate ideal journalists to develop news quality and rebuild a professional community? This paper offers a special perspective in the inner world of journalists’ and the rapidly changing external environment, and concludes that instead of subvert journalistic ideals, digital media technology offered some opportunities for inculcate journalistic ideals. And journalism training organizations should better pay more attention on journalism ideal guide rather than let technology determine all their training programmes.