News and Updates

 

2 Interesting Publications

Thrilled to have have a commentary titled “Mapping and Measuring Media Ownership”  accepted for publishing (forthcoming) in Economic and Political Weekly.  

After Have contributed to the discussion on how WhatsApp could stop fake news. This time in the Columbia  Journalism Review.  This has impact. People in News,Tech and Governments read it and discussed implementation of the idea!

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

 

Summer conference update and publication alert-(ACM)Web Science

After a 4 year hiatus, attended the web sci conference in Amsterdam. In a first, Angela Wu and I decided to have our paper published in the ACM proceedings.
Our paper identifies seven constellations (in the figure below) which reveal different trajectories of American web user behavior through analysis of user clickstreams.
figure 4

Fake News isn’t that big of a problem: At least judging by its audience!

My new paper (with Jacob Nelson) argues and demonstrates that the fake news audience is both small and disloyal. Forthcoming in New Media & Society. Meanwhile you can read it here.

Fall 2017: New Job

Starting August 16th 2017 I will be an assistant professor at the College of Media (dept of advertising) at UIUC (University of Illinois Urbana Champaign).

April 2017: Paper Forthcoming in New Media & Society

Are young people really shunning the news?  Our study  argues and demonstrates that the commonly assumed generational gap in online news consumption is much smaller than commonly assumed.  Pre-publication version available here .

Hello 2017: New Year, New Project

I am a core team member of the “People’s Internet Project” an in-depth three continent study investigating the role of the Internet (as a communication medium) in people’s lives in three continents: USA, Europe and China. Funded by the Carlsberg foundation , Klaus Bhrus Jensesn and Rasmus Helles are leading the project.

It involves analysis of trace data on global web use, surveys and ethnographic immersions.

Fall 2016:

Presented a keynote speech at a seminar on Media Exposure Measurement at the Amsterdam Institute of Communication Research

Summer 2016:

Used some of my research findings to try and stop Facebook from rolling out it’s insidious Free Basics program in India through two popular media articles

  1. Like China’s Great Firewall, Facebook’s Free Basics Could Alter the Online Behaviour of Indians

  2. Exploring the Dubious Maths Behind Facebook’s Free Basics

20 April 2016: Two recently accepted papers, now “live”:

  • Mapping an Audience Centric World Wide Web in New Media & Society 
    • Here I compare simultaneously obtained data on Global Web Usage with data on  Global Hyperlinks between the world’s most 1000 popular sites. I find that the two diverge
  • Using Commercial Audience Measurement Data in Academic Research:
    • Given the problem with surveys in measuring media exposure, I introduce academics to the ways in which commercial audience measurement data can be analyzed in theoretically productive ways.
  • Both papers are sole authored

05 April 2016: Awarded the Richard Wallace Faculty Incentive Grant by the University of Missouri Alumni Association 

10 March 2016:  Recent publications on “Global Web Use”

Spring Semester 2016

From Jan 2016- May 2016:  I am a fellow at the Reynolds Journalism Institute (which means I won’t be teaching this semester.) I will be working on research (with Angela Xiao Wu) to analyze the role of news in people’s online lives.

2015 in one update

Since I haven’t updated info here for more than a year, I thought I will provide an year end  summary .

Articles

Awards

  • Received the ICA 2015 outstanding article of the year for the paper (with Angela Xiao Wu)  Does the Great Firewall Really Isolate the Chinese?   You may remember the coverage an earlier version received in the Washington Post
  • I secured a University of Missouri Research Council Grant to investigate the role of elections in changing patterns of online news consumption. I am examining the online news behavior before, during and after the 2014 General Elections in India.
  • In November 2014 , ( technically not 2015 ) my dissertation won the Outstanding Dissertation Award form National Communication Association’s International and Intercultural Communication Division3

 Teaching and Advising

  1. My first two MA advisees have successfully defended their theses. Andrew Yost worked on Nielsen’s response to changes in Television Audience Measurement and Mary Kate worked on  Double Jeopardy in the Long Tail of Web Audiences
  2. In Spring 2015, I  developed and taught an advanced research methods focusing on 1) observational casual inference and 2) social network analysis for graduate students.

Older News

31st July 2014: My paper , “Still Glued to the Box?” (with Vijay Viswanathan of Northwestern University) which investigates why people still watch a lot of TV in the traditional manner, has been published in International Journal of Communication.

27th June 2014: Awarded the best poster for our submission at the recently concluded WebScience conference.

7th – 11th July 2014: I will be attending the NSF funded doctoral summer institute by the Center for the Study of Socio Technical systems.  Incidentally, this time the meeting is at the University of Missouri, Columbia coordinated by Sean P. Goggins of the Informatics Institute at Mizzou.

22-26 June 2014:  Angela Xiao Wu and I will be at the ACM Web Science Conference presenting our work entitled, “What Balkanizes the Internet: Access Denied or Access Unwanted?”. This paper is the first presentation of our findings from the project linking Internet Censorship and Online User Behavior funded by the Internet Policy Observatory at the Annenberg School at Penn. 

June 2014:  I have been awarded the Graduate Dissertation Award in Communication Studies by the School of Communication, Northwestern University.

May 2014:  I received a Faculty Development Grant from Mizzou Advantage, University of Missouri to attend the ACM Web Science conference at Indiana University, Bloomington,

February 2014: The article I co-authored with Angela Xiao Wu examining the connection between the Great Firewall of China and people’s web use pattern has been accepted for publication in The Information Society.

“Does the Great Firewall really isolate the Chinese? Integrating access blockage with cultural factors to explain web user behavior.”  Read the paper

January 2014: I have started working as an Assistant Professor at the Missouri School of Journalism.

December 2013: A sole authored paper, for which I interviewed television and advertising executives, “Audience Measurement and Media Fragmentation” appeared in the Journal of Media Economics.

November 2013: I completed and defended my PhD Dissertation.

August 2013: I won the Chaffee /McLoed Award from the Communication Theory and Methodology Division of AEJMC for my Paper ” Mapping an Audience Centric World Wide Web. A Departure from Hyperlink Analysis.”

June 2013: The Washington Post reported  on a recent paper of mine co-authored with   Angela Wu .  This research has also won top paper awards at AEJMC and CIRC Conferences.

10 Feb 2013 : My paper titled “Audience Measurement and Media Fragmentation: Revisiting the Monopoly Question” has been accepted for publication in Journal of Media Economics. You can read a pre-print version here here 

6 June 2012 : My Paper Titled “Measuring Media Use Across Platforms: Evolving Audience Information Systems” is now published in International Journal on Media Management 

20 March 2012: My Paper Titled “Media Consumption Across Platforms: Identifying User Defined Repertoires” is online as an early publication on the New Media and Society site

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