Efrat Nechushtai

Efrat Nechushtai is an assistant professor at the George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs. Her 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.  

Dr. Nechushtai 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 book, Does Trust Matter? Why Journalists Need to Rethink Their Relationship to Their Audience is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. Based on extensive ethnographic research, the book explores how journalists around the world are responding to public distrust and hostility.

Her scholarship received the 2025 Mass Communication and Society Article of the Year award, the 2022 Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum Award for Scholarship in Postal History, the 2022 Top Paper Abstract Award from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Political Communication division (Midwinter conference), and the 2021 Top Faculty Paper award from the International Communication Association Journalism Studies division.

Dr. Nechushtai received her Ph.D. in communications from Columbia University in 2020. She was previously a Knight News Innovation Fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, an Andrew Wellington Cordier Teaching Fellow at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs, and a visiting fellow at the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences. Before entering academia, she worked as an editor and staff writer at Haaretz.