Biography
Seth C. Lewis (Ph.D., the 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 the University of 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 the oncoming 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.