The founding of the School of Journalism and Communication can be traced back to the initiation of the major of journalism in 1959 in the discipline of Chinese language and literature. In 1983, the State Education Commission chose to rebuild the major of Journalism and established the department of Journalism, out of a requirement in regard to the strategic layout for constructing key majors. In July, 2004, Lanzhou University founded the School of Journalism and Communication. In July, 2014, in accord to the themes of the documents from the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and the Ministry of Education, the Propaganda Department of the Gansu Provincial Committee and Lanzhou University signed an agreement for jointly constructing the school, which became “a school of co-construction by the Department and the University”.
The school currently holds first-level education qualification for Master of Journalism and Communication as well as for Professional Master of Journalism and Communication. At the present, the school is trying hard to set up a first-level qualification of doctorate education. There are 81 academic postgraduates and 102 professional postgraduates in the school.
The majors in the school include journalism, radio and television, advertising, and internet and new media, in which the major of internet and new media adopts a “2+2” model, two-year study at other schools and another two-year at the School of Journalism and Communication. A brand new major of digital media technology has been approved and will start enrollment in the Autumn of 2018. So far, there are 571 undergraduate students in the school.
There are 55 staff in the school, including 38 full-time teachers (10 professors and 13 associate professors), 5 experimental teachers (1 senior engineers and 4 engineers), and 12 administrative staff.
The alumni of the school work and get high reputation across traditional media and new media organizations in domestic China. There are several hundreds of alumni working at central news units of the state such as Xinhua News Agency, CCTV, China National Radio, Guangming Daily, Economic Daily, China Youth and so on. Many of the alumni become leaders or core professionals. Alumni of the school have won a number of nation-wide awards in the public appraisal of journalistic works, such as “China’s News Awards”, “National Good News”, “Taofen Xin Miao Award”, and so on.
The school focuses on the development of news and communication in the northwestern China, the ethnic minority districts and the economically undeveloped areas, which has been famously known as “school of the western China” and “LZU model” in the fields of Chinese journalism studies, public relations, advertising education and scheming. In the construction of “double first class” (first-class university and first-class discipline) project, the school principally targets at the research of “strategic communication of the Silk Road” while strengthening the study on “Communist journalism history”.
