Rate My Professor Lucas Graves

Lucas Graves is a Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He earned a Ph.D. and an M.S. in journalism from Columbia University and a B.A. in political science from the University of Chicago. Prior to his academic career, Graves worked as a magazine journalist, writing for Wired on topics including citizen journalism, doomsday cults, and the future of advertising, as well as for Interview, Time Out New York, Food & Wine, and The Brooklyn Rail. From 1999 to 2002, he served as a media and technology analyst at Jupiter Research in New York City and São Paulo. Graves joined the UW–Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication in 2012 as an associate professor and advanced to full professor. He holds concurrent roles as Distinguished Researcher at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and Faculty Associate at the Public Tech Media Lab. Additional affiliations include the Holtz Center for Science & Technology Studies, the Center for Communication and Democracy, research fellowships at the New America Foundation and Columbia University’s Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, and research associate at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University, where he previously served as acting Director of Research.

Graves’s research centers on new organizations and practices in the emerging news ecosystem, the global fact-checking movement, annotative journalism, net neutrality, and the challenges digital networks pose to media and political institutions. He authored Deciding What’s True: The Rise of Political Fact-Checking in American Journalism (Columbia University Press, 2016) and co-authored The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism (Columbia University Press and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism). His work appears in the New York Times, Columbia Journalism Review, Nieman Journalism Lab, and scholarly journals including Journal of Communication, International Journal of Communication, and Journalism: Theory, Practice, Criticism. Graves received the 2021 Vilas Associates Award, providing up to two-ninths of summer research salary support for 2021 and 2022 and $12,500 flexible research funds annually for two years. In 2016, he earned a Baldwin Idea Grant with Michael Wagner to develop an explanatory journalism curriculum featuring a live fact-checking site. His research receives support from the American Press Institute, Poynter Institute, Duke Reporters’ Lab, and Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.