Maria Elena Gronemeyer

Maria-Elena Gronemeyer received her degree and title as a journalist in 1981 by the School of Journalism in the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.  She obtained her Ph.D. in Mass Communication in 2002 by the School of Journalism in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  From September 2003 to September 2010 she was the director of the School of Journalism in the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.

She began teaching at Pontificia Universidad in 1990, first in Journalistic Writing and Editing classes. From 2000 on she teaches Communication Ethics in the undergraduate Journalism program and in two master programs at the same school. For her doctoral thesis she did an empirical and qualitative investigation on the degree of autonomy and independence of Chilean journalists.

Journalism ethics is her main field of research and in that area she has made investigations on investigative journalism and about journalists’ autonomy as perceived in their informative products. Before dedicating herself to teaching she worked as a journalist in Chile’s reference newspaper El Mercurio and was for two years at the head of an international press office in Germany.