Rate My Professor Jacob Nelson

Jacob Nelson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah, where he serves as Journalism Coordinator. He joined the University of Utah as Assistant Professor in 2022 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2024. Previously, he was Assistant Professor at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University from 2018 to 2022. Nelson earned his Ph.D. in Media, Technology and Society from the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University in 2018, M.A. in Media, Technology and Society from Northwestern in 2014, and B.S. in Journalism, Creative Writing from Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications in 2010.

Nelson's research focuses on the relationship between journalists and the public, including how journalists perceive and pursue audiences, audience engagement, news trust, fake news consumption, and news audience behavior. He is the author of Imagined Audiences: How Journalists Perceive and Pursue the Public (Oxford University Press, 2021), a finalist for the Frank Luther Mott/Kappa Tau Alpha Research Award, and co-author of American Cynicism: Why We Distrust Journalism, Medicine, and Academia (MIT Press, under contract). His key publications include "The small, disloyal fake news audience: The role of audience availability in fake news consumption" (New Media & Society, 2018), "The myth of partisan selective exposure: A portrait of the online political news audience" (Social Media + Society, 2017), "The next media regime: The pursuit of ‘audience engagement’ in journalism" (Journalism, 2021), "Allies, Antagonists, and Apathetic: A synthesis and path forward for news audience research" (Journalism Studies, 2025), and "Prepared for Precarity: Toward a ‘Labor Turn’ in Journalism Education" (Journalism & Mass Communication Educator, 2024). Nelson is co-founder of the Engaged Journalism Exchange, Virgil C. Aldrich Faculty Fellow at the Tanner Humanities Center (2024-2025), recipient of Faculty Fellow Award from the College of Humanities (2024), Top Paper Awards from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (2025, 2022), Top Article Award from Journalism Practice (2020), and Outstanding Dissertation Award from AEJMC's Participatory Journalism Interest Group (2019).