Matthew Powers is a Professor in the Department of Communication, and Co-Director of the Department’s Center for Journalism, Media and Democracy. 

His most recent book, The Journalist’s Predicament: Difficult Choices in a Declining Profession, (with Sandra Vera-Zambrano) was published in 2023 by Columbia University Press. Based on a decade of research in France and the United States, it asks how individuals become attracted to journalism — and how they manage that attraction amidst the many transformations (economic, social, technological) that confront the profession.

With Adrienne Russell, he is editor of Rethinking Media Research for Changing Societies (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Bringing together leading scholars of media and public life, the book asks how researchers can make sense of the massive changes confronting politics and media. 

His first book, NGOs as Newsmakers: The Changing Landscape of International News (Columbia, 2018), examines the growing role of non-governmental news organizations in shaping–and sometimes directly producing–coverage of humanitarian and human rights issues. It received the “Outstanding Book Award” from the Journalism Studies Division of the International Communication Association in 2019. 

At the University of Washington, Powers teaches undergraduate courses in ethics and comparative media. At the graduate level, he runs seminars in qualitative and comparative methods, as well as in the sociology of journalism and cultural production. 

Selected publications