John Wihbey is an associate professor in the College of Arts, Media and Design at Northeastern University, where he heads the graduate programs in the School of Journalism and Media Innovation. He is the author of The Social Fact: News and Knowledge in a Networked World (MIT Press, 2019), and he has served as a research consultant for Twitter, Inc., and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
His research and teaching interests focus on the intersection of news and social media; emerging media technologies; public knowledge levels and media consumption; computational journalism and visualization; misinformation and media literacy; and policy issues relating to social media platforms. He serves as Lead Investigator for the Ethics of Content Labeling Project at Northeastern’s Ethics Institute, which is exploring various aspects of social media content moderation.
His writing and research have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe, as well as New Media & Society, Yale Journal of Law and Technology, The Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review, Journalism Practice, Newspaper Research Journal, Journal of the International Symposium on Online Journalism, The International Encyclopedia of Journalism Studies, Oxford Research Encyclopedias, International Conference on Web and Social Media, and International Conference on Social Media and Society. His research has received awards from the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), International Symposium on Online Journalism (ISOJ), and Kantar Information Is Beautiful.
John has worked in news media, including for The Star-Ledger (Newark, N.J.) and the NPR show “On Point” (WBUR-Boston), served as an advisor to social media companies, and was an assistant director at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, where he helped found the Journalist’s Resource project. He has also served on the advisory board of Project Information Literacy.
An affiliate of the Northeastern School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs, John co-founded Northeastern’s Co-Laboratory for Data Impact. John is also a faculty affiliate with the Global Resilience Institute and the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks. He was general co-chair of the Computation + Journalism Symposium in 2020 and 2021. He is a graduate of Bowdoin College (magna cum laude); holds an M.A. from Middlebury College and an M.S. from Columbia University; and is completing a Doctor of Education from Northeastern University, with a research focus on new institutions at the intersection of technology and democracy.
