Academic journals emerged to meet the efficiency, openness, and credibility needs of academic exchange. Conventionally, they are regarded as neutral knowledge containers and transparent communication channels, and their functions are reductively simplified to the promotion of academic exchange. However, academic journals possess other functions and influences worthy of attention, which carry great enlightening significance for the in-depth, systematic, and comprehensive understanding of their value as media. At the same time, existing academic journal research has largely ignored the unique research perspective of media geography. This paper aims to transcend this limitation by adopting the theoretical perspective of media geography and employing the production of space, place shaping, landscape alienation, scale construction, and temporal politics as an integrated analytical framework. It examines the complex interaction and power dynamics of various factors behind the publication of academic journals, responds to the multiple dilemmas faced by the current academic journal ecosystem, and seeks to explore new ideas, practical paths, and theoretical support for the governance reform and high-quality development of academic journals. This paper finds that academic journals are not only neutral academic exchange platforms, but also dynamic constructive forces shaping space, place, landscape, scale, and time, profoundly shaping the geographical pattern, local image, scholar behavior, and temporal rhythm of global knowledge production. Through a hierarchical evaluation system and editorial process, academic journals continually reproduce and strengthen the center–periphery structure of global knowledge production. They enable certain regions, institutions, and theoretical schools to always occupy the commanding heights of discourse, authenticating local knowledge that conforms to specific paradigms as global discourse, geographically marginalizing other voices, constructing publishing barriers for non-mainstream research, and imposing strict time discipline on scholars via time hierarchy and time inequality. In view of the unbalanced geographical and temporal structure constructed by academic journals, media-geography analysis can provide multi-angle governance insights and practical implications. From the perspective of the production of space, the governance of academic journals should break the monopoly of commercial publishing, promote diversified open spaces, establish an equitable power negotiation mechanism, and support journals in non-English and marginal areas. From the perspective of place shaping, place shaping should be incorporated into journal evaluation, journals should be encouraged to focus on local issues, the global expression of local knowledge should be supported, and China's independent knowledge system should be constructed. From the perspective of landscape alienation, the paper calls to reform the evaluation system, weaken the dependence on impact factors, turn to multiple evaluation, expose the drawbacks of 'index-only-ism', and advocate the connotation construction of journals. From the perspective of scale construction, a multi-layer collaborative governance system should be established, adopting the scale-jump strategy of 'local issues–global perspective', and building an open scientific scale network. From the perspective of temporal politics, the paper calls to break temporal hegemony, respect the rhythm of multiple knowledge traditions, establish a slow-science mechanism, avoid speed competition, and ensure fairness of publication time across regions.