Adrienne Russell

Adrienne Russell is an American academic whose work focuses on the digital-age evolution of journalism and activist communication. She is currently Mary Laird Wood Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington and co-director with Matt Powers of the department's Center for Journalism, Media and Democracy.

Adrienne Russell
Russell in Istanbul, 2011
Born (1971-02-24) February 24, 1971
Santa Monica, California
NationalityAmerican
EducationPh.D.
Alma materUniversity of Calif.-Santa Cruz (undergraduate)
Stanford University (graduate)
University of Ind.-Bloomington (graduate)
OccupationCommunication
Spouse(s)John Tomasic
Childrenone girl, one boy

Biography

Russell earned a Ph.D. in Journalism and Mass Communication from Indiana University, Bloomington, in 2001, an M.S. in Media Studies from Stanford University in 1995, and a B.A. in World Literature and Cultural Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1993. Russell was an associate professor at the University of Denver with a joint appointment in Emergent Digital Practices and in the Media, Film, and Journalism department, where she was also director of graduate studies (2007-2017); an assistant professor in the Department of Global Communication at the American University of Paris (2003-2005); and a research fellow at the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California (2005-2007) and at the London School of Economics Department of Media and Communication (2015).

Research

Russell's research[1] centers on the digital-era evolving relationship between media and public culture. In her early work, she explored activist communication in relation to journalism, mapping the terrain of the expanding networked information-media landscape and investigating related shifting journalism norms and practices. In recent work, she presents environmental journalism as a rich site of innovation and chronicles the way reporters covering the environment have long worked a space rife with misinformation. Russell argues that the climate and information crises today are most productively viewed as inextricable parts of a single larger crisis in public communication and culture—that criticism of journalism for failing to convey persuasively the urgency of the climate crisis misses half the story.

Russell's 2016 book, Journalism as Activism: Recoding Media Power (Polity), seeks to update thinking about communication and politics in the mediated era. The book centers on an emerging vanguard of activists and journalists remaking communication tools and genres to better cover contemporary networked life.

From the book's back-cover blurb:

In the mediated digital era, communication is changing fast and eating up ever greater shares of real-world power. Corporate battles and guerrilla wars are fought on Twitter. Facebook is the new Berlin — home to tinkers, tailors, spies and terrorist recruiters. We recognize the power shift instinctively but, in our attempts to understand it, we keep using conceptual and theoretical models that are not changing fast, that are barely changing at all, that are laid over from the past.

Journalism remains one of the main sites of communication power, an expanded space where citizens, protesters, PR professionals, tech developers and hackers can directly shape the news. Adrienne Russell reports on media power from one of the most vibrant corners of the journalism field, the corner where journalists and activists from countries around the world cross streams. Russell demonstrates the way the relationship between digital journalism and digital activism has shaped coverage of the online civil liberties movement, the Occupy movement, and the climate change movement. Journalism as Activism explores the ways everyday meaning and the material realities of media power are tied to the communication tools and platforms we have access to, the architectures of digital space we navigate, and our ability to master and modify our media environments.

Russell is a member of Media Climate, an international group of scholars conducting ongoing comparative research on news coverage of climate change. She also contributed to the book Something Old, Something New: Digital Media and the Coverage of Climate Change (Reuters Institute/I.B. Tauris book series 2016), part of a collaborative project led by James Painter aimed at documenting the coverage produced and the practices followed during the 2015 Paris Climate Summit by digital or "new-journalism" outlets of the time, including BuzzFeed, the Huffington Post, and Vice.

She participated in a transnational research project on coverage of information on the US National Security Agency snooping programs leaked by Edward Snowden. The research results are detailed in the book Journalism and the NSA Revelations: Privacy, Security and the Press (Reuters Institute/I.B. Tauris book series 2016), which she co-edited with Risto Kunelius, Heikki Heikkila, and Dimitri Jagodin.

Russell's first book, Networked: A Contemporary History of News in Transition (Polity 2011), examined the transformation of journalism since the mid-1990s.

"Networked journalism is journalism that sees publics acting as creators, investigators, reactors, re-makers and re-distributors of news," she wrote. "It is journalism where all variety of media -- amateur and professional, corporate and independent -- intersect at a new level. The variety of forms and perspectives that deliver news in this environment and the number of connections linking creators to the public and to one another significantly influence the news and have expanded journalism as a category of information and as a genre of storytelling."[2]

Russell has edited special editions of the journals New Media and Society (2005) and Journalism: Theory, Criticism, Practice (2011). She was co-author of the book Networked Publics (MIT 2008), which examines the ways social and cultural shifts fostered by emergent technologies have transformed relationships with place, culture, politics and infrastructure. She co-edited with Nabil Echchaibi the book International Blogging: Identity, Politics and Networked Publics (Peter Lang 2009), which addresses the western-focus that has characterized much new-media research. In the introduction, she wrote that the book was "part of a larger effort in media studies to address the parochialism of much contemporary scholarship by considering media practices and products developed around the world," and that, "The proliferation of new forms and the rise of the audience as a major participant [highlights] the absurdity of theory elaboration based on isolated Western case studies."[3]

References
  1. "Adrienne Russell". Adrienne Russell. Retrieved 2015-08-25.
  2. "Book - Adrienne Russell - Networked: A Contemporary History of News in Transition". politybooks.com. Archived from the original on 2016-03-03. Retrieved 2015-08-25.
  3. "International Blogging". peterlang.com. Archived from the original on 2016-03-04. Retrieved 2015-08-25.
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