Professor Kate Wright
Job Title
Personal Chair in Media and Communications
Research interests
Research interests
Prof Kate Wright’s award-winning research explores how journalism, digital media, and AI intersect with politics, focusing on political economy, media governance, and production practice. She brings a qualitative, policy-oriented perspective, spanning political communication, media ethics, and sociological analysis, with a broad, comparative approach across multiple regions and industry contexts.
Her current UKRI-funded project investigates how public service media implement Responsible AI in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Europe, and Oceania. Her most recent book analysed global patterns of media capture and democratic backsliding, including a detailed study of the Voice of America network under the first Trump administration. Her previous work examined the reporting of humanitarian affairs worldwide.
Kate has pioneered interdisciplinary teaching within SPS, designing courses that give students a deep understanding of the changing political, economic, and technological contexts shaping media organisations and practices. Her methodological expertise includes interviewing in sensitive contexts, document and archival research, Critical Discourse Analysis, and multimodal textual analysis.
She is the founder and co-Lead for the 80-strong interdisciplinary research cluster in Media and Communications at Edinburgh Futures Institute, a Fellow of the Generative AI Laboratory, and is registered as a supervisor for the CDT in Responsible NLP. She is a research associate of the Centre for Governance and Human Rights at the University of Cambridge and sits on the editorial boards of two of the 'top five' communications journals, Digital Journalism and the International Journal of Press/Politics. She has also served on an expert panel, assessing research on journalism and platformisation for the Observatory on Information and Democracy, which advises policymakers in 50 countries.
Her work bridges media, AI, and politics, providing students and the School with a distinctive interdisciplinary perspective on journalism, governance, and global democratic challenges.
PhD students
***Please note that Prof Wright is not accepting any more new PhD students for 2026-2027, apart from the studentships already slated***
Current
Nurul Iman Muhamad Dimyati
Michael Urquhart
Completed
Background
Books
Wright, K, Scott, M and Bunce, M. (2024) Capturing News, Capturing Democracy: Trump and the Voice of America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Winner of the Outstanding Monograph of the Year award, given by the UK's Media, Communication and Cultural Studies Association (2025), and finalist for the Best Book award given by Journalism Studies division of the International Communication Association (2025), as well as the Tankard Award, given by the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (2025). Reviewed by Cultural Studies, Democratization, Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly and the Australian Institute of International Affairs.
Scott, M, Wright, K and Bunce, M (2022) Humanitarian Journalists: Covering Crises from a Boundary Zone. London: Routledge. Reviewed in African Journalism Studies and the European Journal of Communication.
Wright, K (2018) Who's Reporting Africa Now? Non-Governmental Organizations, Journalists and Multimedia. London, New York: Peter Lang. Reviewed by Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism, the International Journal of Communication and LSE's Centre for Africa.
Peer-reviewed publications
Wright, K, Madrid-Morales, D. ,and Barrie, C. (2025) Beyond “emergencies?" Reporting on humanitarian issues around the world. Digital Journalism. ONLINE FIRST
Scott, M, Bunce, M and Wright, K (2022) The influence of news coverage on humanitarian aid: The bureaucrats’ perspective. Journalism Studies 23 (2): 167-186.
Scott, M, Wright, K and Bunce, M (2021) The politics of humanitarian journalism. In L. Chouliaraki and A. Vestergaard (Eds.) Routledge Handbook of Humanitarian Communication. London: Routledge.
Wright, K, Scott, M, and Bunce, M (2020) Soft power, hard news: How journalists at state-funded transnational media legitimize their work. International Journal of Press/Politics 25 (4): 607-631. OPEN ACCESS.
Wright, K, Zamith, R, and Bebawi, S (2019) Commentary on Special Issue. Data Journalism in Majority World Countries: Challenges and Opportunities. Digital Journalism 7(9): 1295-1302
Mutsvairo, B and Wright, K (2019) Research trajectories in African digital spheres. In M. Dwyer and T. Molony (Eds.) Social Media and Politics in Africa. London: Zed Books
Bunce, M, Scott, M, and Wright K (2019) Humanitarian journalism. In H. Ornebring and H. Wasserman (Eds.) Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Wright, K (2019) NGOs as news organizations. In H. Ornebring and H. Wasserman (Eds.) Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Scott, M, Bunce, M, and Wright, K (2019) Foundation funding and the boundaries of journalism. Journalism Studies 20(14): 2034-2052. OPEN ACCESS
Wright, K., Scott, M, and Bunce, M (2019) Foundation-funded journalism, philanthrocapitalism and tainted donors. Journalism Studies. 20(5): 675-695. OPEN ACCESS.
Wright, K (2018). "Helping our beneficiaries tell their own stories?" International aid agencies and the politics of voice in news production. Global Media and Communication 14(1): 85-102
Scott, M, Bunce, M, and Wright, K (2018) Doing good and looking good in global humanitarian reporting: Is philanthrojournalism good news? In F. Enghel and J. Noske-Turner (Eds.) Communication in International Development: Doing Good or Looking Good? London: Routledge.
Bunce, M, Wright, K, and Scott, M (2018) "Our newsroom in the cloud": Slack, virtual newsrooms and journalistic practice. New Media and Society 20(9): 3381-3399. OPEN ACCESS.
Scott, M, Bunce, M, and Wright, K (2017) Donor power and the news: The influence of foundation funding on international public service journalism. International Journal of Press/ Politics 22 (2): 163-184. OPEN ACCESS.
Wright, K (2017). Public-commercial hybridity at BBC News Online: Covering non-governmental organisations in Africa. In A. Davis (Ed.) The Death of Public Knowledge? How Free Markets Destroy the General Intellect. London: Goldsmiths/MIT Press
Wright, K (2016). Moral economies: Interrogating the interactions of NGOs, journalists and freelancers. International Journal of Communication 10:1510-1529. OPEN ACCESS
Wright, K (2016) "It was a simple, positive story of African self-help" (manufactured for a Kenyan NGO by advertising multinationals). In M. Bunce, S. Franks, and C. Paterson (Eds.) Africa's Media Image in the Twenty-First Century: from the 'Heart of Darkness' to 'Africa Rising'. London: Routledge.
Wright, K (2015). "These grey areas": Freelancers and the blurring of INGOs and news organisations. Journalism Studies 17(8):989-1009
Wright, K (2014) Should journalists be 'virtuous'? Mainstream news production, complex media organisations, and the work of Nick Couldry. Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism 15(3):364-381
Wright, K (2012) Educating rookies: Might guided problem-based learning help first year journalism students learn to inter-relate theory and practice? Journalism Education 1(2):8-25. OPEN ACCESS
Wright, K (2011) Listening to suffering: What does 'proper distance' have to do with radio news? Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism, 13(3): 284-302
Wright, K (2011) Reality without scare quotes: Developing the case for Critical Realism in journalism research. Journalism Studies, 12(2):156-171
Reviews
Wright, K (2019) Review of The Fixers: Local News Workers' Perspectives on International Reporting by Lindsay Palmer. Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism 20(10) ONLINE FIRST
Wright, K (2018) Review of Television production in the UK: From cottage industry to big business, by David Lee. Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism 19(8) ONLINE FIRST.
Public scholarship
Wright, K and Porter, K. (2025) Mapping how public service media use AI in journalism. Industry report. Public Media Alliance, August 13.
Information ecosystems and troubled democracy: A global synthesis of the state of knowledge on news media, AI and data governance (January 2025). Observatory on Information and Democracy. I served on one of the expert research assessment groups (name listed pp. xxxv).
Wright, K (2025) Voice of America has to provide ‘accurate, objective and comprehensive’ news – could that all change? The Conversation. 22 January.
Wright, K and Scott, M (2023) Podcast with Dave O'Brien on Humanitarian Journalists for the New Books Network, Feb 8.
Scott, M, Wright, K, and Bunce, M (2023) Why so many humanitarian crises are 'forgotten' and 5 ideas to change that. Op Ed. The New Humanitarian. Jan 16.
Scott, M, Wright, K, and Bunce, M (2022) New research shows how news coverage influences countries' emergency aid budgets. Nieman Lab, Harvard University, Jan 10.
Scott, M, Wright, K, and Bunce, M (2021) How news coverage influences countries' emergency aid budgets- new research'. The Conversation. 14 Dec.
Wright, K (2020) 'How Journalists at State-Funded Transnational Media Legitimize Their Work'. An interview with Carolina Are. The Humanitarian News Research Network, 29 June.
Wright, K, Scott, M and Bunce, M (2020) Voice of America: struggle for independence highlights issue of state role in government-backed media. Op. Ed. The Conversation, 25 June
Wright, K (2019) Why did Epstein fund non-profit media? Blog, 23 August.
Wright, K (2019) Podcast on NGO journalism about Africa with Dickens Olewe, 26 February.
Wright, K 2019) Who's reporting Africa now? Invited blog for Africa is a Country, 18 February.
Wright, K (2018) How ready are journalists to cover the big humanitarian stories? Invited Op. Ed. for the International Broadcasting Trust, 25 October.
Scott, M, Wright, K, and Bunce, M (2018) The State of Humanitarian Journalism (2018). Industry report. Norwich: University of East Anglia
Scott, M, Wright, K, and Bunce, M (2018) Foundation Support for International Non-Profit News: Mapping the Funding Landscape. Industry Report. Norwich: University of East Anglia
Wright, K (2018) NGOs and Journalism. A Q and A with Carolina Are. The Humanitarian News Research Network, 27 June.
Works within
Staff Hours and Guidance
PhD candidates should make appointments by email.