I am excited to announce that my first book, tentatively titled Performing the News, is under contract with Rutgers University Press. This book draws primarily on in-depth interviews with current and former journalists who perform for audiences on television, radio, and podcasts. I also spoke with those who advise on or direct such performances, including…

I’ve been an avid podcast listener for years. After attending the 2020 Transom Traveling workshop for aspiring podcasters, I got involved in a range of projects. Most notably, I host and produce a series called Areas of Agreement that examines the urban-rural divide in the United States. Here’s the full description: One of the most…

I’ve thought about audience analytics a lot over the last few years. I helped created a course at Towson University called Media Audiences & Analytics in which students learn basic concepts and principles of audience measurement in advertising, public relations, and journalism. The course reviews major analytics tools and platforms for website, search, and social…

How should journalists define, measure and discuss impact? It’s a question I’ve spent much of the past several years thinking about, reading about and — most recently — writing about. My first attempt to answer the question came in a journal article I co-authored, “What Can Nonprofit Journalists Actually do for Democracy?,” that examines how…

In the months since the fake news epidemic garnered national attention, much of the news coverage has been on how Facebook and other media/tech companies can change their algorithms or encourage crowdsourcing to help stop the spread of bogus information. That’s certainly a major component of combating fake news, defined here as wholly false news…

If the 2020 U.S. presidential election was like previous cycles, plenty of young people scanned political news on social media but didn’t contribute to the political conversation. And that’s a problem for civic life given the importance of social media as a place for political expression. Research I co-authored about the 2018 election cycle,  “Shouting…

What exactly is an engagement editor? I’ve wondered that for some time as I saw job ads with a title that sounded both vague and very of-the-moment. To find out the answer, I spoke with engagement editors from The Washington Post, Fortune, The Hill, The Center for Public Integrity and Engadget — and one former…