Josh Braun’s Homepage

At UMass Amherst, I teach “Media, Technology & Culture,” “Media Criticism,” “Journalism Ethics,” “Web Design for Journalists,” and “Science Journalism.”

A major goal of mine is to support students in engaging directly with the work of the scholars and industry observers writing and speaking about their field. The readings for my undergraduate classes therefore often include journal articles, chapters of books from university presses, and other readings more typical of graduate-level courses. In my work as a professor, I view my role not as the person who delivers you a bunch of summarized research, ideas, and debates, but rather as the person who’s there to support students as they engage directly with the sources of contemporary research, ideas, and debates.

A good analogy would be visiting an unfamiliar country with a traveling companion who knows the culture. You may not be familiar with the language or the history of the place, or you may have an outsider’s view of these things. A good traveling companion is one who can help you to engage with the locals and the regional culture without getting in the way of you experiencing things for yourself. Wherever possible, they facilitate your interactions and conversations rather than becoming a filter for them.

This is how I view my job as an instructor. I’ve spent a lot of time familiarizing myself with the larger conversations my students are about to explore, learning the specific jargon of various scholars and industry critics, and doing research on particular case studies. And I’m here to provide students the benefit of that experience: to give background on the larger conversations and trends of which our readings and various materials are a part and to explain unfamiliar terms and references, as well as to help students engage in conversations that are important to them while making their points in ways that will be received by the locals in the spirit in which they intend them.

This is inevitably a bit of a balancing act on the part of a traveling companion. Even when they are dedicated to giving you the most direct experience possible, they are nonetheless inevitably tasked with boiling down regional turns of phrase and the larger contexts in which you find yourself — things which may have long and complicated histories — in ways that allow you to engage immediately with the conversation and the task at hand. This is invariably a messy process that involves your guide filtering questions through the lens of personal biases and experiences. Often the questions of tourists are the ones that most thoroughly test the boundaries of locals’ knowledge and assumptions.

My job is no different from the traveling companion’s in these respects. The best I can do is to try always to be vigilantly self-aware, to be frank about my biases and the boundaries of my experience, and to always be willing to say, “I'll find the answer for you,” even when I might get away with saying, “I know the answer.” Student questions help me with this process. In fact, as with many professors, some of my best research questions come out of conversations with my students. Their questions force me to confront the limits of my knowledge, to understand what I need to learn more about in order to help them, as well as to become a better scholar. The phrase “learning communities” has become an oft-abused buzzword at universities — so much so that I hesitate to use it. But whatever phraseology I might invoke, the underlying truth remains that when higher education is working at its best everyone grows and learns together in a collective that includes both students and their professors.

Through the implementation of a “flipped” classroom and other strategies, I have done my best to design classroom experiences that facilitate lively critical conversations to this end. I also hold that an engaging course is one in which students are cognizant of what they will be able to do with the skills and concepts they are learning, and glean from them a sense of personal accomplishment, while at the same time developing a critical understanding of the field they are studying and the work they are doing.

All of us inevitably do most of our learning outside of formal education contexts — the role of a good course, and a good professor, is to equip students to make the world their classroom, to teach the tools and critical thinking skills that will enable students to continue to glean the best learning opportunities from their experiences long after they’ve left a particular course or university.

“As we spend most of our time online, what remains unseen are the ways in which media travel to meet us there. Joshua Braun’s brilliant book shows what that takes.”
—Mark Deuze, author of Media Work and Media Life

“Understanding the tremendous transformation now taking place in the news industry requires knowing the nuts and bolts of digital distribution as well as production. Josh Braun shows us what this means in a vivid study of how the people at MSNBC sort and circulate journalists' work as they respond to new competition, technology, and constructions of audience. Read this book and you will never look at television news — or for that matter ‘television’ — in the same way again.”
—Joseph Turow, author of The Daily You

“Elegantly interweaving past theories and studies with new data, Braun brilliantly dissects the consequences of the sociotechnical structure of distribution systems for who gets to know what and how they know it.”
—Gaye Tuchman, author of Making News and Wannabe U

“Braun opens the black box of how television news today reaches its audiences. Through in-depth fieldwork, he provides fresh insights into the complex diversity of today’s media organisations, and makes a major contribution to organizational sociology too.”
—Nick Couldry, author of Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice

“Braun is an original and bold thinker. This book is a tremendous contribution to the study of digital distribution infrastructures and practices, with a focus on contemporary news media that is truly exceptional.”
—Jennifer Holt, author of Empires of Entertainment

“This Program Is Brought to You By… is a ground-breaking work that offers an ambitious conceptualization and rigorous empirical study of contemporary multi-platform journalism. This book will define the study of media distribution in the decades to come.”
—Daniel Kreiss, author of Taking Our Country Back: The Crafting of Networked Politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama

“How do media messages move in the 21st century? Fusing perspectives from science and technology studies and communication research, Joshua Braun takes us a long way towards an answer in this theoretically rich, empirically fascinating study of televisual and digital distribution practices. This Program is Brought to You By… is an essential read for both scholars and citizens looking for insights into our digitally mediated age.”
—C. W. Anderson, author of Rebuilding the News: Metropolitan Journalism in the Digital Age

“Building on the literature on news production in the digital age, Joshua Braun provides a masterful portrait of news distribution. In an original and readable account of MSNBC’s teams and organizations, Braun explores how and why a large legacy news organization develops and deploys content distribution.”
—Valérie Bélair-Gagnon, Executive Director and Research Scholar, Yale Information Society Project and author of Social Media at BBC News: The Re-Making of Crisis Reporting

“In an era of always-on media, it’s easy to forget how information reaches our screens — and yet that process of distribution, often following a tangled path through digital intermediaries, is an increasingly central part of media work. Meanwhile, scholars have remained focused on media production and consumption at the neglect of distribution. This book tackles that problem head-on, providing a richly constructed analysis of networked distribution systems and the ‘heterogeneous engineering’ behind them. Just as important, this book makes a key interdisciplinary contribution — an artful synthesis of journalism and television studies and the systems-focused insights of science and technology studies.”
—Seth C. Lewis, School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Minnesota

“A nuanced and enlightening account of the networks defining the future of news — a wonderful contribution to multiple fields.”
—Mike Ananny, Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California