Seth Lewis
Biography
Seth C. Lewis (Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin) is Professor, Director of Journalism, and the founding holder of the Shirley Papé Chair in Emerging Media in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon—a position he has held since joining UO in 2016. He has held visiting or affiliated fellow positions with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, and Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, among others. From 2020 to 2022, he served as the elected Chair of the International Communication Association’s Journalism Studies Division, the world’s largest scholarly group dedicated to the study of journalism.
In his research, Lewis examines the social implications of emerging technologies and their particular consequences for news and public life—from the early days of social media to contemporary developments in automation, algorithms, and generative artificial intelligence. He has more than 15,000 citations to a body of work that includes more than 100 journal articles and book chapters—in addition to several books, including News After Trump: Journalism’s Crisis of Relevance in a Changed Media Culture (Oxford University Press, 2021), co-authored with Matt Carlson and Sue Robinson, and the edited volume Boundaries of Journalism: Professionalism, Practices and Participation (Routledge, 2015).
Lewis currently leads two primary streams of research. First, he focuses on AI and journalism, examining how generative AI technologies such as ChatGPT disrupt journalism’s core creative processes, challenging traditional norms around authorship, originality, and the professional identity of journalists. Working with collaborators, he has developed normative, conceptual, and empirical approaches for studying AI and news—including a 2020 study outlining the concept of human-machine communication and its contribution to studying the future of human-machine relationships in a world of AI chatbots. That piece has since been cited nearly 1,000 times across many disciplines, and he is building upon it in ongoing studies of generative AI and journalism. Lewis also is co-authoring, with Rodrigo Zamith and Tomás Dodds, a forthcoming book with Polity Press tentatively titled AI and Journalism: Disruption, Adaptation, and Democratic Futures, offering a sweeping overview of AI and news, with emphasis on matters of power, norms, ethics, and democracy.
His second stream of research addresses why Americans have become increasingly skeptical of key knowledge institutions—especially journalism, medicine, and academia. His work in this area seeks to uncover the root causes of declining public trust, analyzing how factors such as political polarization, media overload, and the problems of personalized fact-checking have reshaped citizens’ relationships with professional expertise and institutions that traditionally organize knowledge for the public good. With collaborator Jacob L. Nelson, Lewis is co-authoring a forthcoming book with MIT Press, Why We Distrust: American Skepticism Toward Media, Medicine, and Academia, which draws from extensive interview-based research to illuminate the narratives people tell themselves about institutions, why these narratives have become predominantly negative, and how society might move toward rebuilding trust.
He is a two-time winner of the International Communication Association’s award for Outstanding Article of the Year in Journalism Studies—in 2016 for the article “Actors, Actants, Audiences, and Activities in Cross-Media News Work,” and in 2013 for “The Tension Between Professional Control and Open Participation: Journalism and its Boundaries,” as well as honorable mention distinctions in 2014 for “Open Source and Journalism: Toward New Frameworks for Imagining News Innovation” and in 2023 for “The One Thing Journalistic AI Just Might Do for Democracy.”
Lewis serves on a number of editorial boards, including for New Media & Society, Journal of Communication, International Journal of Press/Politics, Journalism, and Social Media + Society. He has delivered invited lectures at prominent institutions globally and has offered expert testimony to the UK House of Lords.
His interdisciplinary work includes co-chairing the Communication, Digital Conversation, and Media Technologies Minitrack of the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), recognized as one of the longest-running scientific conferences in Information Technology Management.
Before joining the University of Oregon, Lewis was an associate professor and Mitchell V. Charnley Faculty Fellow at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities, held a visiting appointment with Stanford University’s Program in Science, Technology & Society, and was a Fulbright Scholar to Spain. He has a Ph.D. from the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, an M.B.A. from Barry University, and a B.A. in Communications from Brigham Young University.
He began working as a reporter when he was 16—for The Outlook in Gresham, Oregon—and eventually became Assistant Sports Editor for The Miami Herald before he left full-time professional journalism to pursue an academic career.
Education
PhD, University of Texas at Austin
MBA, Barry University
BA in Communications, Brigham Young University
Publications
[Selected journal publications since 2019; please see Google Scholar for a complete list of papers]
Lewis, S. C., Markowitz, D. M., & Bunquin, J. B. A. (2025). Journalists, emotions, and the introduction of generative AI chatbots: a large-scale analysis of tweets before and after the launch of ChatGPT. Social Media + Society, 11(1), 20563051251325597.
Lewis, S. C., Hermida, A., & Lorenzo, S. (2024). Jobs-to-Be-Done and Journalism Innovation: Making News More Responsive to Community Needs. Media and Communication, 12. https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.7578
Nelson, J. L., Lewis, S. C., & Cowley, B. (2024). ‘Money is the root of all evil.’ How the business of journalism shapes trust in news. Journalism. https://doi.org/10.1177/14648849241246929
Guzman, A. L., & Lewis, S. C. (2024). What Generative AI Means for the Media Industries, and Why it Matters to Study the Collective Consequences for Advertising, Journalism, and Public Relations. Emerging Media. https://doi.org/10.1177/27523543241289239
Mathews, N., Bélair-Gagnon, V., & Lewis, S. C. (2024). News is “toxic”: Exploring the non-sharing of news online. New Media & Society, 26(8), 4629-4646. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221127212
Shin, J., Lewis, S. C., Kim, S., & Thorson, K. (2024). Does high-quality news attract engagement on social media? Mediatization, media logic, and the contrasting values that shape news sharing, liking, and commenting on Facebook. New Media & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448241228851
Moon, Y. E., Roschke, K., Nelson, J. L., & Lewis, S. C. (2023). Doctors Fact-Check, Journalists Get Fact-Checked: Comparing Public Trust in Journalism and Healthcare. Media and Communication, 11(4), 380-391. https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.v11i4.7190
Nechushtai, E., Zamith, R., & Lewis, S. C. (2023). More of the Same? Homogenization in News Recommendations When Users Search on Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. Mass Communication and Society, 27(6), 1309–1335. https://doi.org/10.1080/15205436.2023.2173609
Nelson, J. L., & Lewis, S. C. (2023). Only “sheep” trust journalists? How citizens’ self-perceptions shape their approach to news. New Media & Society, 25(7), 1522-1541. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211018160
Lin, B., & Lewis, S. C. (2022). The one thing journalistic AI just might do for democracy. Digital Journalism, 10(10), 1627-1649. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2022.2084131
Nelson, J. L., & Lewis, S. C. (2022). The structures that shape news consumption: Evidence from the early period of the COVID-19 pandemic. Journalism, 23(12), 2495-2512. https://doi.org/10.1177/14648849221095335
Belair-Gagnon, V., Lewis, S. C., & Agur, C. (2020). Failure to launch: Competing institutional logics, intrapreneurship, and the case of chatbots. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication: JCMC, 25(4), 291–306. https://doi.org/10.1093/jcmc/zmaa008
Lewis, S. C. (2020). The objects and objectives of journalism research during the coronavirus pandemic and beyond. Digital Journalism, 8(5), 681–689. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2020.1773292
Guzman, A. L., & Lewis, S. C. (2020). Artificial intelligence and communication: A Human–Machine Communication research agenda. New Media & Society, 22(1), 70–86. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819858691
Lewis, S. C., Guzman, A. L., & Schmidt, T. R. (2019). Automation, Journalism, and Human–Machine Communication: Rethinking Roles and Relationships of Humans and Machines in News. Digital Journalism, 7(4), 409–427.
Lewis, S. C. (2019). Lack of trust in the news media, institutional weakness, and relational journalism as a way forward. Journalism, 20(1), 44–47.
Nechushtai, E., & Lewis, S. C. (2019). What kind of news gatekeepers do we want machines to be? Filter bubbles, fragmentation, and the normative dimensions of algorithmic recommendations. Computers in Human Behavior, 90, 298–307.
[Selected papers from earlier years]
Lewis, S. C., & Molyneux, L. (2018). A decade of research on social media and journalism: Assumptions, blind spots, and a way forward. Media and Communication, 6(4), 11-23.
Lewis, S. C., & Usher, N. (2016). Trading zones, boundary objects, and the pursuit of news innovation: A case study of journalists and programmers. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 22(5), 543-560.
Lewis, S. C. (2015). Journalism in an era of big data: Cases, concepts, and critiques. Digital Journalism, 3(3), 321-330.
Lewis, S. C. (2015). Reciprocity as a key concept for social media and society. Social Media + Society, 1(1).
Zamith, R., & Lewis, S. C. (2015). Content Analysis and the Algorithmic Coder: What Computational Social Science Means for Traditional Modes of Media Analysis. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. (Published in a special issue, “Toward Computational Social Science: Big Data in Digital Environments.”)
Lewis, S. C., & Westlund, O. (2015). Big Data and Journalism: Epistemology, Expertise, Economics, and Ethics. Digital Journalism.
Lewis, S. C., & Westlund, O. (2015). Actors, actants, audiences, and activities in cross-media news work: A matrix and a research agenda. Digital Journalism, 3(1), 19-37. doi:10.1080/21670811.2014.92798
Lewis, S. C., & Usher, N. (2014). Code, Collaboration, and the Future of Journalism: A Case Study of the Hacks/Hackers Global Network. Digital Journalism, 2(3), 383-393. doi:10.1080/21670811.2014.895504
Westlund, O., & Lewis, S. C. (2014). Agents of Media Innovations: Actors, Actants, and Audiences. The Journal of Media Innovations, 1(2), 10-35. doi:10.5617/jmi.v1i2.856
Lewis, S. C., Holton, A. E., & Coddington, M. (2014). Reciprocal Journalism: A Concept of Mutual Exchange Between Journalists and Audiences. Journalism Practice, 8(2), 229-241. doi:10.1080/17512786.2013.859840
Zamith, R., & Lewis, S. C. (2014). From public spaces to public sphere: Rethinking systems for reader comments on online news sites. Digital Journalism, 2(4), 558-574. doi:10.1080/21670811.2014.882066
Hermida, A., Lewis, S. C., & Zamith, R. (2014). Sourcing the Arab Spring: A Case Study of Andy Carvin’s Sources on Twitter During the Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 19(3), 479-499. doi:10.1111/jcc4.12074 Download
Lee, A., Lewis, S. C., & Powers, M. J. (2014). Audience Clicks and News Placement: A Study of Time-Lagged Influence in Online Journalism. Communication Research, 41(4), 505-530. doi:10.1177/0093650212467031
Lewis, S. C., & Usher, N. (2013). Open Source and Journalism: Toward New Frameworks for Imagining News Innovation. Media, Culture & Society, 35(5), 602-619. doi:10.1177/016344371348549
Lewis, S. C., Zamith, R., & Hermida, A. (2013). Content Analysis in an Era of Big Data: A Hybrid Approach to Computational and Manual Methods. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 57(1), 34–52. doi:10.1080/08838151.2012.76170
Aitamurto, T., &Lewis, S. C. (2013). Open Innovation in Digital Journalism: Examining the Impact of Open APIs at Four News Organizations. New Media & Society, 15(2), 314-331. doi:10.1177/1461444812450682
Lewis, S. C. (2012). The Tension Between Professional Control and Open Participation: Journalism and its Boundaries. Information, Communication & Society, 15(6), 836-866. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2012.674150
Lewis, S. C. (2012). From Journalism to Information: The Transformation of the Knight Foundation and News Innovation. Mass Communication and Society, 15(3), 309-334. doi:10.1080/15205436.2011.611607
Chyi, H. I., Lewis, S. C., & Zheng, N. (2012). A Matter of Life and Death? Examining How Newspapers Covered the Newspaper Crisis. Journalism Studies, 13(3), 305-324. doi:10.1080/1461670X.2011.629090
Lasorsa, D. L., Lewis, S. C., & Holton, A. E. (2012). Normalizing Twitter: Journalism Practice in an Emerging Communication Space. Journalism Studies, 13(1), 19-36. doi:10.1080/1461670X.2011.571825
Lewis, S. C. (2011). Journalism Innovation and Participation: An Analysis of the Knight News Challenge. International Journal of Communication, 5, 1623-1648.
Holton, A., & Lewis, S. C. (2011). Journalists, Social Media, and the Use of Humor on Twitter. The Electronic Journal of Communication / La Revue Electronic de Communication, 21(1-2).
Gil de Zúñiga, H., Lewis, S. C., Hinsley, A. W., Valenzuela, S., Lee, J. K., & Baresch, B. (2011). Blogging as a Journalistic Practice: A Model Linking Perception, Motivation, and Behavior. Journalism: Theory, Practice, Criticism, 12(5), 586-606. doi:10.1177/1464884910388230
Lewis, S. C., Kaufhold, K., & Lasorsa, D. L. (2010). Thinking about Citizen Journalism: The Philosophical and Practical Challenges of User-Generated Content for Community Newspapers. Journalism Practice, 4(2), 163-179. doi:10.1080/14616700903156919
Areas of Expertise:
- Artificial intelligence
- Journalism studies
- Media innovation
- Emerging technologies
- Social media
- Digital culture
- Technology and society
- Generative AI and news