John Wihbey

College of Arts, Media and Design Assistant Professor, Journalism and Media Innovation

John Wihbey is an assistant professor of journalism and media innovation at Northeastern University, where he heads the graduate programs in the School of Journalism. He is the author of The Social Fact: News and Knowledge in a Networked World (MIT Press, 2019). An affiliate of the Northeastern School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs and the Ethics Institute, he is also faculty co-director of Northeastern’s Co-Laboratory for Data Impact.

His research and teaching interests include the intersection of news and social media; misinformation and media literacy; the use of data and data visualization in journalism and communications; and issues of policy relating to news and social media platforms. His writing and research has appeared in The New York TimesThe AtlanticThe Washington Post, and The Boston Globe, as well as Journalism PracticeNew Media & SocietyNewspaper Research JournalJournal of the International Symposium on Online JournalismThe International Encyclopedia of Journalism Studies, and Oxford Research Encyclopedias

John is a faculty affiliate with the Global Resilience Institute and the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks. He is co-chair of the Computation + Journalism Symposium, to be hosted at Northeastern on March 20 &21, 2020.

Having worked in newspapers, radio, and digital media, he helped found and oversee the Journalist’s Resource project at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, where he continues to serve as a research associate. His recent research has included projects on state government financial disclosurefoundation funding of news nonprofits; and news literacy and engagement among college students. He has served on the advisory board of Project Information Literacy and has been an advisor to media and technology companies. His research has received awards from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), International Symposium on Online Journalism (ISOJ), and Kantar Information Is Beautiful. He holds degrees from Bowdoin College, Middlebury College, and Columbia University.