Adrienne Russell is an American academic whose work focuses on the digital-age evolution of journalism and activist communication.
Education
Russell earned a Doctor of Philosophy in Journalism and Mass Communication from Indiana University, Bloomington, in 2001, an Master of Surgery in Media Studies from Stanford University in 1995, and a Bachelor of Arts in World Literature and Cultural Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1993.
Career
She is currently associate professor of Emergent Digital Practices and Media Film and Journalism at the University of Denver. She was an assistant professor in the Department of Global Communication at the American University of Paris (2003-2005), 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 centers on the changing relationship between the media and public culture in the digital era.
She was editor of special editions of the peer-reviewed journals New Media and Society (2005) and Journalism: Theory, Criticism, Practice (2011).
She was co-author of the book Networked Publics (Massachusetts Institute of Technology 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 Language 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. The proliferation of new forms and the rise of the audience as a major participant.. the absurdity of theory elaboration based on isolated Western case studies."
Russell followed with Networked: A Contemporary History of News in Transition (Polity 2011), an examination of the transformation that has taken place in 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.
"lieutenant 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."
Russell"s forthcoming book (Polity 2016) focuses on the emergent media vanguard made up of activists and journalists dedicated to the politics and the political uses of networked digital communication who are reworking communication tools and communication genres.
She is also a part of a team doing comparative research on public discourse in response to the Edward Snowden revelations. That research centers on discourse taking place in the United States of America, United Kingdom, China, Hong Kong, Russia, Germany, France, Norway and Finland.
Views
Quotations:
"Networked journalism is journalism that sees publics acting as creators, investigators, reactors, re-makers and re-distributors of news,".
Membership
Russell is a member of Media Climate, an international group of scholars conducting comparative research on news coverage of climate change.