I’m an ethnographer who studies the news, and how changes in technology, culture and economics are shaping journalism.

During over a decade of ethnographic research on local news production, I’ve charted new forms of journalistic work and have analyzed the possibilities of — and barriers to — institutional collaboration.  I’ve studied new business models for news, cultural challenges to journalistic authority, and the relationship between practices of software development and journalism. In 2009, I served as the lead research assistant for the Columbia University report The Reconstruction of American Journalism. Also in 2009, I completed my doctoral dissertation Breaking Journalism Down: Work, Authority and the Collapse of Metropolitan Journalism, 1997-2009, which drew extensive research in Philadelphia.

I’m currently working as an Assistant Professor of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island (CUNY). I’m also a Visiting Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project and a Knight Media Policy Fellow at the New America Foundation. I  write regularly for Harvard University’s Nieman Lab.

I have a Ph.D. in Communications from Columbia University. For seven years I volunteered at the New York City Independent Media Center and helped organize the inaugural Grassroots Media Conference in New York City.