Seth C. Lewis

Seth C. Lewis is the inaugural Elcan Jefferson Scholars Foundation Distinguished Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Media Studies at the University of Virginia, where he teaches in the Department of Media Studies.

For two decades, Lewis has studied the social implications of emerging technologies and their consequences for news and public life — from the early days of social media to contemporary developments in automation, algorithms, and generative AI. His body of work, with some 20,000 citations, has been at the forefront in exploring how technologies reshape journalism: how news is produced, how it is distributed across digital platforms, and how people make sense of it.

His book Journalism in the Age of AI: From Acceleration to Reimagination (Polity Press, 2026), co-authored with Rodrigo Zamith and Tomás Dodds, argues that AI is intensifying the “hamster wheel” accelerationism that has been grinding down journalists and public trust — but that it could instead be journalism’s rare chance to break that cycle. Drawing on questions of creativity, democratic accountability, platform power, and human agency, the book offers a toolkit for reimagining journalism not just as an industry but as a profession serving the public good. It is freely available open access at journalismandai.com. 

Other books include the forthcoming American Cynicism: Why We Distrust Media, Medicine, and Academia (MIT Press, 2027), co-authored with Jacob L. Nelson, which draws on extensive interview research to illuminate the stories Americans tell about knowledge institutions, why those stories have turned so negative, and how trust might be rebuilt. He also co-authored News After Trump: Journalism’s Crisis of Relevance in a Changed Media Culture (Oxford University Press, 2021), with Matt Carlson and Sue Robinson, and co-edited Boundaries of Journalism (Routledge, 2015), with Matt Carlson.

Lewis is a two-time winner of the International Communication Association’s award for Outstanding Article of the Year in Journalism Studies (2013 and 2016, with honorable mentions in 2014 and 2023). His 2020 article with Andrea L. Guzman introducing a research agenda for “communicative AI” — published well before ChatGPT — has been cited across disciplines and helped establish human–machine communication as a field of study. From 2020 to 2022, he served as elected Chair of the ICA’s Journalism Studies Division, the world’s largest scholarly group dedicated to the study of journalism. He serves on the editorial boards of New Media & Society, Social Media + Society, and other leading journals, and has offered expert testimony to the UK House of Lords.

He is a faculty affiliate with the Digital Technology for Democracy Lab at the University of Virginia and the Public Tech Media Lab at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and is a non-resident senior fellow with the AI Ethics and Governance Institute (AEGIX). He has held visiting or affiliated fellowships with the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, and the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, among others, and was a Fulbright Scholar to Spain.

Before joining UVA in 2026, Lewis was the founding holder of the Shirley Papé Chair in Emerging Media in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon, where he also served as Director of Journalism for six years. Prior to that, he was an associate professor and Mitchell V. Charnley Faculty Fellow at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin, an M.B.A. from Barry University, and a B.A. from Brigham Young University.

Lewis started his career in journalism. He began working as a reporter at age 16 — for The Outlook in Gresham, Oregon — and eventually became Assistant Sports Editor of The Miami Herald before leaving the newsroom to pursue a Ph.D.