The Worlds of Journalism Study (WJS) brings together researchers from around the globe to answer these questions through one of the largest comparative studies of journalism worldwide. Its third wave provides insights from 75 countries, allowing us to examine how journalists’ professional roles, working conditions, and everyday realities are changing – and how these changes are shaped by different political, economic, social, and media contexts.

The comparative perspective is crucial in research projects operating on such a global scale: the same development can mean very different things in different parts of the world. Understanding journalism globally therefore requires both comparable data and sensitivity to context. This was one of the key points CMC’s Maren Beaufort brought to the WJS panel at the Annual Conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) in New Orleans, where she had the pleasure – and challenge – of representing the European members of the WJS team alongside Tim Vos, Jyotika Ramaprasad, Sallie Hughes, and Vanessa Bravo, who brought perspectives from the Americas and Asia to the panel.

And this is exactly what the WJS team put into practice at the WJS Annual Meeting in Stellenbosch, South Africa. Following the International Communication Association (ICA) Annual Conference in Cape Town, WJS researchers from many of the 75 participating countries came together to exchange perspectives on the study and its findings across different national and regional contexts – and to jointly plan the fourth wave of WJS.