Jennifer R. Henrichsen Awarded Fellowship from Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University

As a fellow, Henrichsen will consider how concerns about surveillance are changing journalists’ digital newsgathering practices.

By Julie Sloane

The Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University announced on Friday that Annenberg doctoral student Jennifer R. Henrichsen is among its newest cohort of Knight News Innovation Fellows.

This fellowship, funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, brings together leading academics and practitioners to examine innovations in journalism tools and practice. Ten research projects were selected this year, on topics including AI & machine learning, digital security, mobile push alerts, voice assistant news, newsroom diversity, conservative news values, and local news capacity and trust.

Henrichsen’s project considers how concerns about surveillance are changing journalists’ digital newsgathering practices, including interactions with their sources, and how security cultures are being established and maintained in leading news organizations in the United States. Her study will clarify how information security practices by journalists and newsrooms may be changing journalistic cultures and norms of professionalism at a time of increased labor precarity, loss of trust in the media, and pervasive surveillance.

Henrichsen was previously affiliated with the Tow Center in 2014-2015 as a Research Fellow and Project Coordinator for its Journalism After Snowden initiative.

Before beginning her doctoral program at Annenberg in 2015, Henrichsen earned a Master’s Degree in International and European Security from the University of Geneva and the Geneva Center for Security Policy, which she completed as part of a Fulbright Research Fellowship.

Henrichsen has been a consultant to UNESCO, where she completed a global research project on digital security issues facing journalists and she wrote the 2017-2018 UNESCO World Trends in Freedom of Expression and Media Development regional report on Western Europe and North America.

She previously worked in the areas of human rights and freedom of expression including at the Open Society Foundations and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and she was a strategic communications associate for the firm Hattaway Communications in Washington, DC. She has been a freelance journalist at the United Nations in Geneva and a political correspondent at the Washington State Legislature.

She is co-author of the book War on Words: Who Should Protect Journalists? (Praeger Publishers/Greenwood Press, 2011) and a co-editor of Journalism after Snowden: The Future of the Free Press in the Surveillance State (Columbia University Press, 2017). She is currently at work co-editing a book on national security and journalism for Oxford University Press.