Efrat Nechushtai
Efrat Nechushtai is an assistant professor in the George Washington University's School of Media and Public Affairs and a Knight News Innovation Fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism. She received her Ph.D. in communications from Columbia University in 2020. Dr. Nechushtai’s research focuses on journalism studies and political communication, and she is particularly interested in the impact of platformization and political polarization on journalism, both in the United States and internationally. She has published qualitative, quantitative, and theoretical studies on these topics in Journalism, Digital Journalism, The International Journal of Press/Politics, Mass Communication and Society, Computers in Human Behavior, Journalism Studies, and Information & Culture.
Her scholarship received the 2021 Top Faculty Paper award from the International Communication Association (Journalism Studies division) for the paper “Before Reception: Trust in the News as Infrastructure” (coauthored with Rachel E. Moran). She was awarded the 2022 Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum Award for Scholarship in Postal History for her paper “Making Messages Private: The Formation of Postal Privacy and its Relevance for Digital Surveillance.” She was also awarded the 2022 Top Paper Abstract Award (Midwinter conference) from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (Political Communication division) for her paper “Politics, Profits, Peers, or Personal Values: What Influences Journalism in the Eyes of the Public and of Journalists.”
Currently she is working on a book manuscript on how journalists in the United States and Germany are responding to anti-media sentiment, based on extensive ethnographic research in both countries.
Dr. Nechushtai was previously an Andrew Wellington Cordier Teaching Fellow in the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs (2018-2020) and a visiting fellow in the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences at the University of Bremen and Jacobs University (2019). Before entering academia, she worked as an editor and staff writer at Haaretz.
SMPA 2101, Journalism: Theory & Practice
SMPA 2151, Research Methods
“Before Reception: Trust in the News as Infrastructure.” Rachel E. Moran and Efrat Nechushtai. (2022). Journalism. doi: 10.1177/14648849211048961
“‘Stay Informed’, ‘Become an Insider’ or ‘Drive Change’: Repackaging Newspaper Subscriptions in the Digital Age.” Efrat Nechushtai and Lior Zalmanson. (2021). Journalism, 22 (8): 2035-2052. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884919847350
“Report for America, Report about Communities: Local News Capacity and Community Trust.” Andrea Wenzel, Sam Ford, and Efrat Nechushtai. (2020). Journalism Studies, 21(3), 287-305.
“Making Messages Private: The Formation of Postal Privacy and its Relevance for Digital Surveillance.” Efrat Nechushtai. (2019). Information & Culture, 54(2), 133-158.
“What Kind of News Gatekeepers Do We Want Machines to Be? Filter Bubbles, Fragmentation, and the Normative Dimensions of Algorithmic Recommendations.” Efrat Nechushtai and Seth C. Lewis. (2019). Computers in Human Behavior, 90, 298-307.
“From Liberal to Polarized Liberal? Contemporary US News in Hallin and Mancini’s Typology of News Systems.” Efrat Nechushtai. (2018). The International Journal of Press/Politics, 23(2),
183-201.
“Could Digital Platforms Capture News through Infrastructure?” Efrat Nechushtai. (2018). Journalism, 19(8), 1043-1058.
Dr. Nechushtai earned a Ph.D. in communications from Columbia University in 2020. She received an M.A. in cultural studies from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2006 and B.A. in social sciences and humanities from the Open University of Israel in 2003.
The roles of journalism, digital platforms and their impact on journalism, trust in the news, comparative journalism studies, polarization and the news