Melissa Wall

I’m a journalism professor at California State University – Northridge and the author of "Citizen Journalism: "Practices, Propaganda, Pedagogy," (2019), the edited volume, "Citizen Journalism: Valuable, Useless or Dangerous" (2012) and “Mapping Citizen and Participatory Journalism in Newsrooms, Classrooms and Beyond” (forthcoming). 

My research focuses on refugees and their uses of communication technologies:  "Syrian refugees and information precarity" published in "New Media & Society"  and the forthcoming volumes, “Sage Handbook of Media and Migration” and “The Handbook of Diasporas, Media and Culture.” Summaries can be found in “The Washington Post” Monkey Cage blog, “E-International Relations,” USC’s CPD blog and “The Hill.”

I also study participatory and citizen media (see key articles including a retrospective  of citizen journalism published in "Digital Journalism;" a book chapter published in the "Routledge Companion to Digital Journalism Studies," and articles focusing on Syrian citizen journalism published in "Digital Journalism" and in "Journalism.")

I am also the creator of the Pop-Up Newsroom, a temporary, virtual newsroom for citizen and student journalists. Pop-Up Newsroom has collaborated with universities around the world to produce collective coverage, including topics such as global poverty and the refugee crisis with university journalism programs in Armenia, Brazil, Bulgaria, India, Lebanon Netherlands, Taiwan and UK. I have published several articles/book chapters  about this project.

My research has been published in journals such as New Media & Society; Journalism; Media, Culture and Society; Journalism Studies; Journal of Communication Inquiry; Journalism Practice; International Communication Gazette; International Journal of Communication; Popular Communication; Rhodes Journalism Review; Journal of Development Communication; Javnost: The Public; Journal of Middle Eastern Media.

My photographs of protests and civil disobedience have been published in the books, "Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance" and "From Act Up to the WTO: Urban Protest and Community Building in the Era of Globalization." along with the "Washington Post Magazine," and "Wildlife Australia."  My photograph of a Damascus newsstand is the cover for an Arabic  textbook, "Al-Kitaab Fii Ta'Allum Al-'Arabiiyya," published by Georgetown University Press.

I have reported from and conducted research in Lebanon, where I was a Fulbright scholar.  I was also an Open Society International Scholar to Ukraine. I have also taught journalism in Lebanon and in Ethiopia, studied township newspapers in Zimbabwe, and produced a radio documentary about the media reform movement in Taiwan. I was selected for a Berglund Fellowship for internet studies and a Poynter fellowship at Indiana University for journalism professors.

My PhD is from the University of Washington.

Please email me if you want any of my papers.