New CEU Student Cohort Joins the Media Influence Matrix

A new cohort of CEU MA students has joined the Media Influence Matrix, a project that the Center for Media, Data and Society (CMDS) has been carrying out since 2017. 

Most of them are pursuing MA degrees at the CEU School of Public Policy, but there are students from the Department of International Relations and Gender Studies as well, and they all participate in the CMDS Practicum course, taught by the Center’s Director, Marius Dragomir.

“The CMDS Practicum course is very important for our center as it allows us to identify talented, hardworking students who maybe some of them will be future policymakers or media analysts,”

he said, adding that “the course is very practical: after a short theoretical introduction, students have to understand how media and journalism work by conducting themselves research about news media in various countries.”

The students are conducting research work in line with the common methodology and research template used in the Media Influence Matrix project.

The project gives them the opportunity to engage with government officials, policymakers, media owners, donor organizations and investors who spend money in media companies. The students collect and tabulate data, carry out interviews and write analytical reports about trends in news media and journalism, based on the information they gather in their work. They feed into the project’s final output, which is a collection of country reports and comparative overviews.

“The course also contributes to CEU’s philosophy of giving students practical skills that they can use in their future careers.

During the course, students produce great work that in the end gets published on our platforms, they interact with our partners and go out to interview politicians, journalists, experts and others. This heavy focus on practice I think it’s incredibly important for whatever they plan to do in their future,” Marius Dragomir emphasized.

CMDS welcomes other CEU students interested in media research to join this effort.

CMDS is running this project as part of a global research and advocacy alliance, the Media and Power Research Consortium, consisting of more than 40 organizations, including academic institutions, advocacy groups, journalist networks and NGOs. The main goal of the research project is to investigate the profound impact that rapid shifts in policy, sources of funding and technology companies are having on journalism today.

The Media Influence Matrix Project is covering three main areas as following: politics and policy, funding of journalism and technology. Focused on news media, the project is building on the goals set by CMDS in its strategy. One of the center’s main strategic goals is to grasp the key shifts in the relationships between media, politics and technology. Research is one way to achieve that.