Sociology Compass
Anya Schiffrin
Senior Lecturer in Discipline of International and Public Affairs
Personal Details
Focus areas: Media, development, innovation, media in Africa and the extractive sector
Anya Schiffrin is a senior lecturer in the discipline of international and public affairs and faculty co-director of the Technology Policy and Innovation (TPI) concentration at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. She previously directed the Technology, Media, and Communications (TMaC) specialization and teaches courses on global media, innovation, and human rights. Dr. Schiffrin writes on journalism and development, investigative reporting in the global south and has published extensively over the last decade on the media in Africa. More recently she has become focused on solutions to the problem of online disinformation, earning her PhD (with honors) on the topic from the University of Navarra. She is the editor of Women in the Digital World, (Routledge, April 2023) Global Muckraking: 100 Years of Investigative Reporting from Around the World (New Press, 2014) and African Muckraking: 75 years of Investigative journalism from Africa (Jakana 2017) She is the editor of Media Capture: How Money, Digital Platforms and Governments Control the News (Columbia University Press 2021.) Her research with economist Haaris Mateen on the valuation of news has been cited in the Atlantic, Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Washington Post and many other publications. She is a leading thinker and commentator on AI and publishing, media sustainability as well as mis/disinformation and media impact.
Education
- PhD with honors, University of Navarra
- MS, Columbia University, School of Journalism
- BA, Reed College
Affiliations
- Natural Resource Governance Initiative
- Global Reporting Center, University of British Columbia
- Initiative for Policy Dialogue (IPD)
- Thomson Reuters Foundation (US)
- Founder, www.journalismtraining.net
- Media & Journalism Research Center, University of Santiago (Spain)
Research And Publications
The New Press
Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism
In The Media
In response to significant advertising revenue losses of the media, primarily driven by dominance of Big Tech platforms over this market, a policy brief cowritten by Anya Schiffrin calls for the implementation of a broad based digital services tax to fund journalism.
Anya Schiffrin interviews NYU professor Rodney Benson, author of How Media Ownership Matters.
"AI companies steal quality news from media companies — they should be forced to pay," writes Anya Schiffrin
Anya Schiffrin, co-director of the Technology, Policy, and Innovation Concentration at SIPA—and lifelong Upper West Side resident—shares her favorites.
“In the old days we thought capture was mostly a problem in Africa and Latin America and then in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall,” noted Anya Schiffrin, another scholar of media capture and the director of the Technology, Media, and Communications specialization at Columbia University. “What’s happened in the last six months in the US is worse than anything we imagined.”