Marie Shanahan
Associate Professor | University of Connecticut
Storrs, CT, UNITED STATES
Professor Shanahan is an expert in the intersection of journalism and digital communication technology, online news and digital discourse.
Spotlight
Biography
Professor Shanahan studies trends in digital discourse, online news commenting, social media, online reputation, news literacy and local news engagement. She has been a reporter, online producer and digital news editor for more than 20 years.
As a journalism instructor, Shanahan helps students gain proficiency in digital news gathering and production. Her courses deliver a practical and theoretical foundation in interactive communications, multimedia reporting, online storytelling and data visualization.
Shanahan’s interest in the possibilities of interactive media led her away from an early career as a print newspaper reporter to the digital side of news. Her first academic book, “Journalism, Online Comments and the Future of Public Discourse,” was published by Routledge in 2017. She also provides digital storytelling and audience engagement training to non-profit news organizations in Connecticut.
Areas of Expertise (8)
News Literacy
Digital Discourse
Journalism
Local news
Media
Multimedia Reporting
Online Storytelling
Online Comments
Education (2)
Quinnipiac University: M.S., Interactive Communications 2010
University of Connecticut: B.A., Journalism and History 1994
Links (1)
Media
Publications:
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Audio/Podcasts:
Media Appearances (13)
Is Hartford Really That Expensive? How Shock And Surprise Help Spread Clickbait News
CT News Junkie online
2024-09-06
How does a report that seems so at odds with reality and common sense find itself going viral and attracting thousand of comments across multiple platforms? According to Associate Professor Marie K. Shanahan, head of the Journalism Department at the University of Connecticut, that sense of disbelief is key to helping stories such as this one spread far and wide. “That headline just sounds so bizarre, right? It’s not what you would expect,” Shanahan said. “So the novelty of that headline is something that gets attention, because I would not pick Hartford as the most expensive city to live, even if it’s maybe not Hartford proper or greater Hartford they’re talking about. But you think about New York and Los Angeles, why would Hartford be that? So the fact that it goes against conventional wisdom gets our attention, that’s one thing. And if it gets our attention, the audience, even locally, then it will get attention from people in New York and people in Los Angeles and other people that pay a lot of money for their housing in different places.”
CT comic tries to publish letters to the editor in all states. Here’s how he did.
Hartford Courant print
2024-07-08
Ginsburg still has not been published in 14 states, including several across the South. He’s more annoyed, though, about not being published in Rhode Island or Maine newspapers. “Mississippi and Alabama I get it,” he said. “Georgia, I get it.” University of Connecticut journalism Professor Marie Shanahan said that’s not a surprise because newspapers want to prioritize opinions from writers in their areas. “Their focus, their mission is to illuminate additional perspective and reader responses to things that have been published in their publication,” she said.
Marie Shanahan on the Wayne Norman Show
WILI Radio radio
2021-02-09
UConn Associate Professor Marie Shanahan joins Wayne Norman for a discussion about politics and social media.
An ‘infodemic’ has overtaken the coronavirus
Journal Inquirer print
2020-03-18
One thing is for sure — there’s an abundance of stories, tweets, and blog posts about the coronavirus. Marie Shanahan, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Connecticut in Storrs who has done studies on online social media discourse, said the World Health Organization has described the problem as an “infodemic.” “It’s an overabundance of information,” she said. “There’s too much information. Some of it’s accurate, some of it’s not and it makes it hard to find trustworthy information. That’s the problem."
In Connecticut, fewer reporters, more missed stories
Phi Delta Kappan online
2019-11-13
Marie Shanahan, associate journalism professor at the University of Connecticut and former reporter with the Hartford Courant, said she hadn’t heard about the case, which is being bankrolled by the Pacific Legal Foundation, a libertarian-leaning organization that also paid for the anti-affirmative action lawsuit against Harvard. But Shanahan doesn’t blame education reporters for missing the story. For her, it’s a reflection of larger trends in the journalism industry. “Part of it, honestly, is the news cycle is like a torrent every single day,” Shanahan said. “We only have so much bandwidth to pay attention to certain things.”
Newsrooms Take the Comments Section Back from Platforms
Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard online
2018-12-31
Journalism’s public trust problem isn’t going away. As the war on truth escalates, news organizations are going to have to counterattack on multiple fronts to win back audience trust. In 2019, journalists will need to to be the aggressor in three areas.
What Aren't People Getting From The Media? Civil Conversations
Hartford Courant
2018-02-20
A traditional function of the press in society is to foster discussion and debate on issues of public concern. One of journalism’s democratic responsibilities is to provide forums for public criticism and compromise. That obligation hasn’t disappeared in the digital age. It’s become even more important. But digital discourse needs a course correction. It’s stuck in a spiral of negativity. The press itself should take a more active role in the conversation.
Live Town Hall: The Press, The President, And The Public
WNPR online
2017-02-13
Tensions are high between the White House and much of mainstream media. While this is largely playing out in Washington, D.C., we're asking this question in Connecticut: What's the role of the local press in a Donald Trump presidency?
How news sites’ online comments helped build our hateful electorate
The Conversation
2016-12-14
Critics may accuse President-elect Donald J. Trump and his supporters of dragging down public discourse in America, but civility took leave of open discussions years ago – online. Beneath digital news stories and social media posts are unmoderated, often anonymous comment streams showing in plain view the anger, condescension, misogyny, xenophobia, racism and nativism simmering within the citizenry.
Can we make comments sections great again?
The Philadelphia Inquirer online
2016-12-10
"Can comment sections survive in the hyperpartisan Trump era? Or should more news organizations pull the plug like NPR, Reuters, Popular Science, and others that have disabled comments?
Yes, Campuses Should Be Safe Spaces — for Debate
Chronicle of Higher Education
2016-01-31
The cry of college students demanding "safe spaces" to protect themselves from speech that could harm their sensitivities doesn’t confound me. I secretly wished for a safe space myself during my first year of teaching. In my case, the expression I wanted to be shielded from wasn’t being shouted at me on the campus quad or discussed in my classroom. It was on Twitter. As a digital-journalism professor, I teach students how to make use of social media for reporting and news delivery. But I made a bad call the first time I instructed my class to use Twitter.
Media: Radical Shift In Control Of The News
Hartford Courant online
2014-10-19
In the era of status updates, Instagram filters and 140-character news alerts on Twitter, awareness in our current technological age orbits around our mobile devices. We check our screens more than 150 times a day, on average, motivated by the never-ending, Internet-powered stream of personalized information discovery. It may be the only way we can fit all the media that's out there into our daily lives.
Comments sections: Controlling the trolls
Al Jazeera online
2014-03-22
For cash-strapped media organisations, controlling the trolls, building the right kind of culture, and getting the best out of online comments is not just a matter of hitting the delete button. To properly moderate a comments section takes people and money. And this has spawned a side industry in online community management.
Research Focus (1)
The Intersection of Journalism and Digital Technology
Professor Shanahan studies trends in digital discourse, online news commenting, social media and local news engagement.
Articles (3)
On Connecticut’s ‘Gold Coast,’ a local news incubator
Columbia Journalism Review2014 Unlike other communities around the country, the suburban towns comprising the Fairfield County, CT “Gold Coast” aren’t suffering a void in local news coverage. It’s quite the opposite. More than 100 media outlets currently deliver local news and information to the area’s residents and businesses, almost all supported by local advertising.
How talk radio listens to its audience, provides lessons for online publishers
Poynter2014 Audience participation hasn’t been an easy undertaking for online news publishers. Thanks to the unruly culture of online commenting and the “sadistic” actions of Internet trolls, every few weeks another news site announces modifications to its online commenting policy.
More news organizations try civilizing online comments with the help of social media
Poynter2013 Patrick Stiegman, editor-in-chief of ESPN.com, said by phone that three factors drove the company’s decision to switch to Facebook for commenting: “a tremendously smooth transition for fans,” many of whom already have Facebook accounts; increased visibility for ESPN content beyond the walls of ESPN.com; and a desire to “emphasize quality of comments over the quantity of comments.”
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