Tamara Witschge

Tamara Witschge is an associate professor and Rosalind Franklin Fellow at the Centre for Media Studies and Journalism at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.

During the past 15 years, she has researched and theorized the role that media and public debate play in society and how this is impacted by changing political, economic, and technological contexts.

Her research at the Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre in London from 2007 to 2009 and the Cardiff School for Journalism from 2009 to 2012 has provided detailed insight into the shifts in journalism, including: the changing business models of journalism; the shifts in the profession; and how audience participation challenges traditional understandings of journalism.

Currently she is further developing her research agenda to deal with the more fundamental questions of what journalism is and how it relates to public debate and democracy. She has published widely on these topics, including an empirical in-depth monograph of the main changes in journalism in the United Kingdom, co-authored with two practicing journalists, one who worked for the BBC and one for the Guardian (Changing Journalism, Routledge, 2012, with Peter Lee-Wright and Angela Phillips). In 2016, the Sage Handbook for Digital Journalism will be published, which she edited together with CW Anderson, David Domingo and Alfred Hermida.

Witschge holds a Ph.D. from the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

She lives in the beautiful, medieval city of Haarlem, in the North West of the Netherlands, enjoys spending her summers in the South of France and/or Helsinki, and her winters in the wonderful Hanseatic City of Hamburg. But wherever she is she tries to connect to the Ashtanga Yoga community, and more recently also the Acro-yoga community. According to Witschge, the world looks so much better if you spend at least part of your day upside-down.