Adrienne Russell

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 Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of Media, Film, and Journalism Studies and an associate professor with a joint appointment in Media, Film, and Journalism and Emergent Digital Practices at the University of Denver (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).

Russell's research[1] centers on the changing relationship between the media and public culture in the digital era. Her work is marked by a relatively fluid approach to research methods, an approach that seems tailored to the rapidly shifting and expanding digital media ecosystem that she studies. Russell writes about what motivates people to use media and what motivates them to remake media to suit their purposes. Russell is the sole author of two books on journalism and activism in the digital era, a long list of peer-reviewed journal articles, and co-author and contributor to internationally published volumes on media theory, power and evolving communication forms and practices.

Russell's most recent book, Journalism as Activism: Recoding Media Power (Polity 2016), focuses on the emergent media vanguard of activists and journalists reworking communication tools and genres and dedicated to the politics and the political uses of networked digital communication.

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 digital 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 now exploring activist and journalist coverage of the environment. She is co-author of the forthcoming book Something Old, Something New: Digital Media and the Coverage of Climate Change (Reuters Institute/I.B. Tauris book series 2016). The work is a collaborative project led by James Painter aimed at documenting the coverage produced and the practices followed by new-journalism outlets such as BuzzFeed, the Huffington Post, and Vice during the 2015 Paris Climate Summit. Based on comparative research from France, Germany, Spain, the UK, and the US, the book demonstrates the value the outlets delivered by providing diverse journalism forms and themes and by giving space to traditionally under-represented voices.

Russell is a member of Media Climate, an international group of scholars conducting ongoing comparative research on news coverage of climate change.

In 2014, Russell also joined a transnational research project on coverage of information on the US National Security Agency snooping programs leaked by contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden. The project includes research being conducted in ten countries (Brazil, China and Hong Kong, Finland, France, Norway, Russia, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States) by scholars who provide each other with native-level analysis of and access to material. The research will be compiled in the forthcoming book (Reuters Institute/I.B. Tauris book series 2016) Journalism and the NSA Revelations: Privacy, Security and the Press, 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... Networked journalism is about a shift in the balance of power between news providers and news consumers. Digital publishing tools and powerful mobile devices are matched by cultural developments, including increased skepticism toward traditional sources of journalistic authority."[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]

• Personal website
• Faculty website
• Times Higher Education review of Networked
• The Guardian review of Networked