Director
Ben Toff
Associate Professor Benjamin Toff is the Director of the Minnesota Journalism Center (MJC), where he leads research focused on understanding changes in the local news ecosystem as well as applied projects partnering with local news outlets to test the effectiveness of strategies designed to rebuild relationships with the public. He is the leading expert on news avoidance, the subject of a co-authored book (2023), and previously led the most extensive, international study to date on trust in news as a Senior Research Fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. His work grapples with both the political implications of the public’s growing disconnection from news and its impact on the sustainability of the industry. His work has been published in the Journal of Communication, Public Opinion Quarterly, Perspectives on Politics, Political Communication, the International Journal of Public Opinion Research, Journalism, Journalism Studies, and Digital Journalism. He received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2016 and a B.A. in social studies from Harvard in 2005. Prior to entering academia, he worked as a journalist and researcher at The New York Times. Contact Ben at [email protected].
Associate director
Meg Martin
Meg Martin associate director of the MJC, where she coordinates programming, operations -- and connections with newsrooms, journalists and support organizations across the state. She is a freelance editor, fact-checker and project manager working with local newsrooms and podcast teams across the country. She worked for nearly a decade at MPR News as a digital editor, podcast editor and managing editor for regional news, special projects and partnerships. She was an editor with the Public Insight Network; led the digital team at The Roanoke Times in southwest Virginia; and began her professional career as a Naughton Fellow and digital editor at The Poynter Institute. She spent the 2022-23 academic year as a Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan, studying how best to prepare, support and connect editors and team leaders in small and mid-size local newsrooms -- a project she's building on with her work at the Minnesota Journalism Center. Contact Meg at [email protected].
Educational Initiatives
Gayle (G.G.) Golden
Gayle Golden is a senior lecturer, Charnley Professor and Morse-Alumni Distinguished University Teacher at the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Her teaching interests include community journalism, literary journalism, magazine writing and teaching the full range of news reporting, writing and digital skills to today's student journalists. For two decades, she has coordinated practicum classes that place students in newsrooms in the Twin Cities for embedded educational experiences to launch them into careers. She also coordinates summer placements for students in news organizations serving marginalized communities in urban areas and serving rural communities in outstate Minnesota through a developing news initiative known as Report for Minnesota. She oversees a yearly class that publishes impactful student coverage of "hidden" student "communities" through an online publication known as AccessU, which has revealed insights about students with disabilities, in recovery, from rural areas, with nontraditional status, with Black identities and with mental health diagnoses. Contact GG at [email protected].
Outreach & Engagement
Regina McCombs
Regina McCombs is a senior lecturer and senior fellow in visual communication and photojournalism at the Hubbard School. She is also focusing on the impact of AI-generated audio, video and photography. Previously, she was the Senior Editor for Visual News at Minnesota Public Radio, working with a team to develop photography and video (for radio!). She was a faculty member of The Poynter Institute, where she taught multimedia, mobile and social journalism. Before teaching at Poynter, she was senior producer for multimedia at StarTribune.com in Minneapolis, arriving there after working as a photographer and field producer at KARE-TV in Minneapolis. Contact Regina at [email protected].
Affiliated Faculty
Colin Agur
Colin Agur is an Associate Professor at the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. His research explores emerging media, with interests in mobile communication, digital games, and the political economy of media. In addition to his book, Education and Social Media: Toward a Digital Future (2016, MIT Press), his work has appeared in journals such as: New Media & Society; Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication; Social Media + Society; Mobile Media & Communication; Media, Culture, & Society; Games & Culture; and Journalism.
Sid Bedingfield
Sid Bedingfield is an Associate Professor at the Hubbard Schoo. His research and teaching focus on journalism's role in democratic societies during times of political and cultural change, with a particular emphasis on civil rights and racial politics. He has been publishing peer-reviewed studies in the fields of journalism history and media studies since 2010. He is co-editor, with Kathy Roberts Forde, of Journalism and Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America, a collaborative project that documents the role of the white press in building and protecting white supremacist political economies in the South at the turn of the twentieth century. Prior to academia, he spent more than two decades as a professional journalist covering political contests in the United States and abroad.
Valérie Bélair-Gagnon
Valérie Bélair-Gagnon is Associate Professor and Cowles Fellow in Media Management at the Hubbard School of Journalism & Mass Communication. She is also a Waldfogel Scholars of the College of Liberal Arts (2023-26) and McKnight Presidential Fellow (2022-2025) at the University of Minnesota. Her affiliations include: the Department of Communication as Oslo Metropolitan University, the Department of Sociology at the University of Minnesota and Yale Law School Information Society Project. She uses qualitative methods and use hybrid methodologies and theories at the intersection of the sociology of work/organizations and journalism studies.
Matt Carlson
Professor Matt Carlson is a journalism studies scholar focused on what is happening to news in a changing media environment. His research concentrates primarily on how different actors publicly compete to define journalism and its boundaries, dictate its normative and ethical commitments, and establish proper forms of news—all of which has epistemic and political consequences for society.
Elisia Cohen
Elisia Cohen is the Hubbard School's director and the John and Elizabeth Cowles Chair in Journalism. Locally, she is engaged with a variety of professional associations and is currently a board member of the Minnesota Newspaper Institute, the National Scholastic Press Association and Associated Collegiate Press. She has an interest in news reporting of community and public health issues, and is working with the center on its news business research projects.
Laura Garbes
Laura Garbes is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at University of Minnesota. She studies racism, whiteness, and cultural organizations. Her current research project explores the racialization of sound in public broadcasting.
Dan Myers
C. Daniel Myers is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. His research in political psychology and political communication focuses on how examines how people picture politics – their mental representations the groups, conflicts, and issues involved in collective decision making – and how communication, broadly defined, shapes these pictures. Much of his work studies the effects of new political institutions inspired by deliberative democratic theory. He also conducts research on experimental methods and causal inference in political science.
Alvin Zhou
Alvin Zhou is an Assistant Professor at the Hubbard School. His research centers around computational social science and strategic communication. Specifically, he studies advertising, public relations, audience analytics, and the various ways digital technologies (e.g., artificial intelligence, platform design, mobile access, behavioral trace) are changing their industry practices and social implications. His work has appeared in journals across communication subfields, including New Media & Society, Journal of Communication, Journal of Public Relations Research, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Mass Communication and Society, Public Relations Review, Social Media + Society, and Political Communication.
Affiliated Postdoctoral Students
Meagan Doll
Meagan is a communication researcher and journalist by training. She studies intersections between journalism and public opinion, with particular interests in perceptions of conflict reporting and factors driving media (dis)trust in strong-state environments. Her work is published in several leading communication journals, including Journalism, Journalism Studies, The International Journal of Press/Politics, and Mass Communication and Society.
Suhwoo Ahn
Suhwoo Ahn joined the Hubbard School from the Department of Communication at Michigan State University. His research centers on how communication processes shape attitudes and beliefs about the political world, for better or for worse. This connects his work on political media use to misinformation. His work has led to scholarly publications in leading journals in the field, such as Journal of Communication, Communication Monographs, and Patient Education and Counseling.
Affiliated Graduate Students
Elliott Edsall
Elliott Edsall is a first-year doctoral student at the Hubbard School. He earned his MA in sociology at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. His research examines the sociology of right-wing media and American conservatism, focusing on social class, political identities and the relationship right-wing outlets have with their audiences. This interest ties directly into a wide array of literatures and disciplines, spanning political communication, sociological, social, and cultural theory, theories of populism, nationalism, and social psychology. Elliott is currently a research assistant for Dr. Joan C. Williams of the UC-San Francisco Center for WorkLife Law and has worked in the past with Dr. Reece Peck, author of ‘Fox Populism: Branding Conservatism as Working Class.’
Cydney Grannan
Cydney Grannan is a first year MA student at the Hubbard School. Her research interests involve journalism studies and political communication, including audience trust in news, journalism practice, and how technology impacts media and political ecosystems. Grannan is a former journalist at WAMU 88.5, the D.C. area’s NPR station, where she produced a local talk show, reported stories for radio, and served as a fill-in host for local programs.
Michael Ofori
Michael Ofori is a first-year doctoral student at the HSJMC pursuing the Political Communication track. He earned his MA degree in International/Intercultural Communication from Bowling Green State University. His research focuses on the interplay of media and politics from global perspective. He researched "Role of Political Alliance in Global News Framing and Source Attribution Strategies: A Comparison of US, UK, China and India’s News Coverage of the Russia-Ukraine War" for his master's thesis. Michael has gotten his individual/co-authored research papers accepted and presented at various communication conferences including at the 2023 ICA Conference, 2022 and 2023 AEJMC Conferences, the 2022 NCA Conference. He will present his research in this year's NCA Conference in Maryland. Michael has co-authored papers in the Internet Research and Online Media and Global Communication. He is currently a teaching assistant for the JOUR 3006: Visual Communication and JOUR 3745: Media and Pop Culture.