ELTE Media Center: Mission statement.

The Department of Communication (EMC) was established in 1992 within the Department of Aesthetics of ELTE – with the support of the Canadian government, Hungarian private firms and the Soros Foundation. The Department's goal was to train and educate the next generation of democratic journalists. Three streams were identified: journalism, radio- and television and public relations and advertising. Right from the beginning we were able to reach very high quality: we developed our curriculum in partnership with the Sociology Institute, the Law Faculty and the members of the main players of the media market. We became the first high-quality communication center of the country. It is thus not surprising that 80-90% of our students were able to successfully find jobs after graduation.

From 1998 we changed the profile of EMC: among the fast-growing number of communications schools we wanted to ensure our leading role and re-oriented our education policies. We emphasized the scientific, analytical approach to media and courses of this nature started to dominate the curriculum. Among new courses we introduced web-casting, web-analysis, cultural anthropology, legal and public administration studies, remembrance-policy, media-sociology in addition to the instruction and discussion of media-analysis methodologies. As part of this re-orientation we are organizing two international conference annually with the involvement of related sciences, partner institutions and the media. The content of these conferences can be viewed live on the internet. In parallel with this we were able to live up to the requirements of the age with state-of-the-art technologies in the practical part of our education (e.g. digital imaging was included in our television training and EMC's own radio station went on air, operated by our own students (EPER Radio 97.00 MHz)).

Teachers of EMC are coming from our mother institute, the Art-theory and Media-science Institute and the very best of the media profession. It is our stated goal to build a student body open to new trends, critical in democratic politicking and well-versed in world affairs. We have a requirement that our students have another (or two) other majors besides communication (let them be lawyers, historians, economists or doctors). We believe that only a multi-faceted media professional can find its place in today's competitive media world. Only professionals with a well-founded scientific background can meet the challenges of democratic media practice and politics.