Adrienne Russell

Adrienne Russell is an American communication scholar whose research focuses on journalism, digital media, environmental communication, activist communication, and communication infrastructure. She is the Mary Laird Wood Professor of Communication at the University of Washington and co-director of the university's Center for Journalism, Media, and Democracy.

Russell is the author of three books: Networked: A Contemporary History of News in Transition (2011), Journalism as Activism: Recoding Media Power (2016), and The Mediated Climate: How Journalists, Big Tech, and Activists Are Vying for Our Future (2023). Her research has examined the changing boundaries of journalism in the digital era, the relationship between journalism and activist media, and the intersection of journalism, digital technologies, and the climate crisis.

Education and career

Russell earned a BA in World Literature and Cultural Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1993, an MS in Media Studies from Stanford University in 1995, and a PhD in Journalism and Mass Communication from Indiana University Bloomington in 2001.

Russell subsequently focused more explicitly on the relationship between journalism and activist communication. Her 2016 book, Journalism as Activism: Recoding Media Power, examined activists, journalists, and other media makers using digital networks and communication practices to challenge established forms of media power.

Reviewing the book in the International Journal of Communication, Yazan Badran described its central argument as identifying a fundamental shift in the form and location of media power associated with a new generation of activists and media makers. The book was also reviewed by Emiliano Treré in Media, Culture & Society.

Russell has continued to examine the increasingly porous boundaries among journalism, activism, and public communication. With Silvio Waisbord, she introduced the concept of "news flashpoints" to describe periods of intensified attention in networked media environments during which journalists, publics, activists, and strategic communicators compete to shape public discourse.

Climate and environmental communication

Russell's later research has increasingly focused on environmental communication and the relationship between the climate crisis and transformations in journalism and digital media.

Her 2023 book, The Mediated Climate: How Journalists, Big Tech, and Activists Are Vying for Our Future, examines the climate crisis in relation to changes in contemporary information systems. The book considers the roles of journalism, technology companies, activists, and other media actors in shaping public understanding of and responses to climate change.

In a review for the London School of Economics' Review of Books, Tanya Goyal situated the book within scholarship on environmental and climate-crisis communication and described its argument as connecting the climate crisis to an information crisis shaped by concentrated media power.

Russell's more recent research has extended these questions to the environmental consequences and politics of digital technologies themselves, including the relationship among technological imaginaries, communication infrastructures, and the climate crisis.

Books

Authored

Edited and co-edited

International Blogging: Identity, Politics, and Networked Publics, co-edited with Nabil Echchaibi (Peter Lang, 2009). Something Old, Something New: Digital Media and the Coverage of Climate Change, co-edited with James Painter, María Carmen Erviti, Richard Fletcher, Candice Howarth, Silje Kristiansen, Bienvenido León, Alan Ouakrat, and Mike S. Schäfer (Reuters Institute/I.B. Tauris, 2016). Journalism and the NSA Revelations: Privacy, Security and the Press, co-edited with Risto Kunelius, Heikki Heikkilä, and Dmitry Yagodin (Reuters Institute/I.B. Tauris, 2017). Rethinking Media Research for Changing Societies, co-edited with Matt Powers (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Editorial work

Russell has served on the editorial boards of Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism and Social Media + Society. She has edited special issues of New Media & Society on new media and global political resistance and Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism on global media activism. With Matt Powers, she co-edits "2K", a section of Social Media + Society devoted to public scholarship on media and technology.