Seth Lewis, PhD

Seth Lewis is an internationally recognized expert on news and technology, with more than 10,000 citations to a body of work that includes nearly 100 journal articles and book chapters. He recently co-authored the book, “News After Trump: Journalism's Crisis of Relevance in a Changed Media Culture,” which was published by Oxford University Press. His research, which broadly addresses the social implications of emerging technologies, focuses on the digital transformation of journalism — from how news is made (news production) to how people make sense of it in their everyday lives (news consumption).

In addition to being the founding holder of the Shirley Papé Chair in Emerging Media in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon, Lewis is a fellow with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, an affiliate fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, an affiliated faculty member of the University of Oregon's Agora Journalism Center and Center for Science Communication Research, and a recent visiting fellow at the University of Oxford's Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. 

He is a two-time winner of the International Communication Association’s award for Outstanding Article of the Year in Journalism Studies — in 2016 for the article “Actors, Actants, Audiences, and Activities in Cross-Media News Work,” and in 2013 for “The Tension Between Professional Control and Open Participation: Journalism and its Boundaries,” as well as an honorable mention distinction in 2014 for “Open Source and Journalism: Toward New Frameworks for Imagining News Innovation.”

During the past decade, Lewis has been a leader in studying innovations in digital journalism, both in examining developments in journalistic practice as well as in introducing new conceptual frameworks for making sense of change. In 2009, he co-organized one of the first major studies of journalists’ use of social media, in an article that has become one of the most-cited papers in the field (Lasorsa, Lewis, & Holton, 2012). Since that time, Lewis’ research has examined developments in digital audience analytics/metrics, open innovation processes, and computer programming and software development, as well as the role and influence of nonprofit foundations and other actors in shaping news innovation (see Google Scholar for a complete list of papers).