“Journalists, Audiences…and Bots?!” New Thinking About the News

By Eric Owsley
October 19, 2016

Seth C. Lewis, the Shirley Papé Chair in Electronic Media in the School of Journalism and Communications at the University of Oregon, will give a talk at Washington and Lee University on Oct. 21 at 4:30 p.m. in Northen Auditorium, Leyburn Library.

The title of Lewis’ lecture is “Journalists, Audiences…and Bots?! New Ways of Thinking about What’s Happening with News.” The lecture is free and open to the public. It is sponsored by the Department of Journalism and Mass Communications.

“Seth will be looking through three different lenses to view the technological and sociological changes in news,” said Mark Coddington, assistant professor of journalism and mass communications at W&L. “They are boundaries (between journalists and audiences and between journalists and programmers); agents (both journalists and the technologies they use acting as agents of change in news); and reciprocity (expectations of mutual exchange and relationship between journalists and audiences).”

Lewis will argue that “These concepts offer fresh ways of interpreting journalism as a professional field, a form of media work and a way to engage with both human audiences and forms of technology.”

A two-time winner of the Outstanding Article in Journalism Studies Award, Lewis explores the digital transformation of journalism, with a focus on human-technology interactions and media innovation processes associated with data, code, audience analytics, social media and related subjects.

Lewis is the editor of “Journalism in an Era of Big Data: Cases, Concepts and Critiques” (2016) and co-editor of “Boundaries of Journalism: Professionalism, Practices and Participation” (2015).

Before joining the University of Oregon in 2016, he was associate professor and Mitchell V. Charnley Faculty Fellow in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.

He has also held appointments as visiting fellow in Yale Law School’s Information Society Project and as visiting scholar in The Program in Science, Technology and Society at Stanford University.