Assistant Professor Rodrigo Zamith Wins Top AEJMC Dissertation Award

Ebru Kardan

Rodrigo Zamith, assistant professor in the Journalism Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has received the Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication’s Nafziger-White-Salwen Dissertation Award. The award recognizes the best dissertation published in the discipline of mass communication in 2015. 

Titled “Editorial Judgement in an Age of Data: How Audience Analytics and Metrics Are Influencing the Placement of News Products,” Zamith’s dissertation explores the relationship between audience metrics and editorial decisions about news placement on digital news sites.

Through an empirical analysis of more than a dozen news organizations, Zamith found that the popularity of news stories, measured through page views, did not dictate where news information would appear on the homepages of several different news organizations. Instead, news placement was decided by a “broader cocktail of inputs, including traditional news values, that give journalists a sense of purpose” and there continued to be a “notable gap between what journalists consider to be newsworthy and readers noteworthy.” 

“This research should give pause to fears of editors shirking their editorial responsibilities in order to chase clicks or cater to the lowest common denominator,” Zamith said. “It offers empirical evidence that while online editors are certainly mindful of audience metrics, they continue to tap their editorial judgment and remain conscious of their duty to their communities.”

Zamith’s dissertation also introduced a framework for computationally analyzing different parts of rapidly-changing webpages in order to track changes in the presentation of content and evaluated the extent to which researchers could use lists of most-viewed items on the homepages of news organizations as a proxy for popularity. Portions of the dissertation have been published or are currently under review by some of the field’s top peer-reviewed journals. 

Zamith joined the UMass Journalism faculty in fall 2015 and has taught Data-driven Storytelling, Introduction to Journalism and Introduction to Visual Storytelling. 

“We started recruiting Rodrigo as soon as he went on the job market,” said Journalism Chair Kathy Roberts Forde, “and we were delighted when he decided to join our faculty. His research is both empirically rigorous and methodologically innovative, and it has important implications for professional news practice and perhaps even media policy. This award recognizes what we already knew about Rodrigo’s scholarship, and it’s wonderful that our national/international community of scholars recognizes its excellence, too.” 

Zamith received his Ph.D. in mass communication from the University of Minnesota. He is an affiliate faculty member in the UMass Computational Social Science Institute.

Zamith also recently received a competitive Lilly Fellowship for Teaching Excellence for 2016-2017. The program offers junior faculty the opportunity to collaborate, research and refine courses. As a Lilly Fellow, Zamith will further develop Data-driven Storytelling, a course designed to teach students the necessary skills to analyze data and produce interactive, data-driven news stories.  

Learn more about Rodrigo on his faculty profile.  

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