Meagan Doll: Introducing Hubbard School’s New Postdoctoral Fellow

Meagan Doll joined the Minnesota Journalism Center at the Hubbard School of Journalism & Mass Communication as a postdoctoral research associate in fall 2024. She shares her journey from Wisconsin to Minnesota and the problems her work seeks to address.

What brought you to the University of Minnesota?

As I was finishing my PhD at the University of Washington last spring, I was looking for full-time research positions at the intersection of journalism studies and political communication. Too often, these two sub-areas are not in great conversation with one another, even though they share many interests and objects of study, including news media, citizens' opinions, and political attitudes. 

Fortunately, the Minnesota Journalism Center is doing a lot of exciting work in this area, including studies around how news media shape civic attitudes and perceptions. This combination of journalism studies and political communication perspectives will make these respective fields stronger, and I'm thrilled to be a part of that. As a bonus, I grew up about an hour from the UMN and did my undergraduate degree at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, so it has also been a joy to be back in the Midwest.

How did you become interested in what you study and teach?

I specialize in mixed-method research that explores media attitudes and international journalism. I became interested in journalism toward the end of high school when I began interning for the Osceola Sun and Country Messenger newspapers, based in Osceola, Wisconsin, and Scandia, Minnesota, respectively. After getting my degree in journalism, I spent some time reporting on public health in Uganda, which was a really formative experience and got me thinking about how audiences perceive different types of news reports. 

But it wasn't until after I had spent about five years as the assistant director of the UW-Madison African Studies Program that I caught the research bug and decided to complete my PhD in communication at the University of Washington. So, it was really the combination of professional international reporting experience and exposure to top-tier, interdisciplinary social science research at UW-Madison that motivated me to study cross-national perceptions of news. I feel really lucky that I get to continue working and teaching in these areas at UMN!

What questions and ideas are you most interested in exploring right now? 

Right now, much of my work explores the factors driving trust in journalism as well as how trust can be (re)built with disinterested or distrusting audiences. Researchers have been working to understand media trust for decades, though relatively little of this work is conducted outside of Euro-American contexts. 

One of my ongoing projects looks at factors driving media trust in Uganda, which may have important insights for other non-WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) societies. I'm especially interested in how aspects of Uganda's sociopolitical environment, such as perceptions of press freedom or political culture, are shaping how people think about trust in news.

At the Minnesota Journalism Center, we have several ongoing projects looking at what news organizations can do to improve audience trust in journalism in the United States. News organizations across the country are experimenting with new, innovative ways to connect with audiences, including short-form videos, texting initiatives, and public events. We hope that our work will illuminate audience preferences and expectations of news organizations in these spaces. The goal is to ultimately guide media professionals toward more meaningful engagement with new and existing audiences.

If you could design a course on any topic, what would it be and how would you frame it?

I would love to teach a class on peace and news media. Many universities have courses on conflict and communication or war and journalism, but I think it's equally important to think about solution-oriented approaches to mass communication and journalism. 

The scope of the course would be broad enough to cover journalistic approaches (peace journalism, solutions journalism, etc.) as well as audience reception of peace messaging, which would draw more from political psychology and research on how media shape attitudes and behaviors.

In terms of broad framing, students would have the opportunity to complicate what "peace" means in diverse contexts, thinking critically about how peace can be defined differently by different actors as well as the extent to which peace means something beyond the mere absence of violence. 

Establishing a working definition is, of course, paramount to being able to meaningfully communicate about peace. At a time when the world is reeling from several ongoing international conflicts, as well as many more systemic and structural inequities, it would probably be a course that everyone–including me!–could benefit from. 

This story was edited by Anushka Raychaudhuri, an undergraduate student in CLA.