Nicole Dahmen

Nicole Dahmen is a Professor at the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon. Dahmen approaches her scholarship through a normative lens, asking not just what journalism is, but what it should be. Her research often illuminates journalism’s shortcomings, not to criticize unjustly, but to advocate for the principles of professional, credible, and ethical news media in service to democracy. Dahmen has gained an international reputation for her scholarship, which falls into three key areas, sometimes standing alone but more frequently intersecting: visual journalism, media ethics, and contextual reporting. In sum, her research seeks to advance public-interest journalism—reporting that holds the powerful accountable, elevates underrepresented voices, and makes a positive impact in society. 

Dahmen’s research is published in such diverse and leading journals as American Behavioral Scientist, Journalism Studies, Digital Journalism, and Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism. And due to the subject matter of her research, her work is also published in the two leading journals for visual scholarship, Visual Communication Quarterly and Visual Communication. She has presented more than 50 conference papers, with top paper awards at both the AEJMC and ICA conferences. She is on the editorial boards of Journal of Mass Media Ethics and Newspaper Research Journal. She's been quoted in The Atlantic, The New York Times, and USA Today; and her bylines appear in Salon, Poynter, and Columbia Journalism Review. She's currently completing an MFA in creative nonfiction at Pacific University. 

With 25 years of university teaching experience, Dahmen has developed and taught a range of undergraduate and graduate courses—from large lectures to hands-on labs to doctoral seminars. At the SOJC, she regularly teaches honors courses, journalism courses, a doctoral seminar, and our core media ethics course. She's the developer and faculty leader of the GEO study abroad experience Instagramming Paris: Media Unfiltered. She's the 2021 Scripps Howard Journalism Professor of the Year, and in 2026 she was named a UO Williams Fellow. 

From 2023-2026 she served as a Faculty Fellow with the UO Clark Honors College. Dahmen spent seven years at the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University as an assistant and later as an associate professor prior to joining the faculty at the SOJC in 2014.