Victor Pickard

Associate Professor, University of Pennsylvania

Victor Pickard is an Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication. His research focuses on the history and political economy of media institutions, media activism, and the politics and normative foundations of media policy. Before coming to Annenberg, he taught at New York University in the media, culture, and communication department. Previously he worked on media policy in Washington, DC as a Senior Research Fellow at the media reform organization Free Press and the public policy think tank the New America Foundation. He also taught media policy at the University of Virginia and served as a Media Policy Fellow for Congresswoman Diane Watson.

Professor Pickard’s work has been published in numerous anthologies and scholarly journals, including Critical Studies in Media Communication, Journal of Communication; Media, Culture & Society; Global Media and Communication; International Journal of Communication; Communication, Culture & Critique; New Media and Society; Journal of Communication Inquiry; Newspaper Research Journal; Journal of Internet Law; International Journal of Communication Law and Policy; CommLaw Conspectus: Journal of Communications Law and Policy; and Political Communication. He is a frequent commentator on public and community radio and he often speaks to the press about media-related issues. He has been interviewed for outlets such as the Washington Post, USA Today, and the Columbia Journalism Review, and his op-eds have appeared in venues like the Guardian, the Seattle Times, the Huffington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Jacobin, The Nation, and The Atlantic.

In 2009, Pickard was the lead author of the first comprehensive report on the American journalism crisis, "Saving the News: Toward a National Journalism Strategy," (published by Free Press as part of the book Changing Media: Public Interest Policies for the Digital Age). He is the co-editor of the books Will the Last Reporter Please Turn out the Lights (with Robert McChesney, published by The New Press), The Future of Internet Policy (with Peter Decherney, published by Routledge), and Media Activism in the Digital Age (with Guobin Yang, published by Routledge), and he is the author of the book America's Battle for Media Democracy: The Triumph of Corporate Libertarianism and the Future of Media Reform (published by Cambridge University Press). Currently he is working on a book about the future of digital journalism.