Announcing new program on independent media, Julia Angwin to join as inaugural director

In light of the rapid transformation of the media landscape, in early 2026 the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School will launch a new initiative focused on independent media. This multi-year project will expand the center’s longstanding work on traditional media to advance research into the emerging media landscape. 

Julia Angwin, award-winning investigative journalist, pioneering journalism entrepreneur, and New York Times contributing opinion writer will serve as the initiative’s founding director.  “This initiative is critical to understanding how people engage with information across multiple platforms, and how that engagement affects attitudes and behavior,” said Shorenstein Center Faculty Director Nancy Gibbs. “Julia’s superb track record as a journalist, entrepreneur, and visionary makes her the perfect person to lead this initiative.”

The new initiative will conduct and host research into the emerging independent media landscape, with a focus on mapping the new information terrain that shapes public discourse, the evolution of standards and practices in reporting the news, and the role that independent media plays in safeguarding democracy. Through convenings and public events, this initiative will establish itself as the center for understanding the diverse set of content creators – from Substackers to YouTubers – who increasingly provide civic information to the public. “There is nothing that is changing our political landscape faster than our fragmented media environment,” Angwin said. “For our democracy to survive and thrive, we must have a deeper understanding of the information landscape, how it serves us and where it needs to be improved. I’m excited to be doing this work inside of an esteemed school of democracy and governance that puts public interest front and center.” 

For the past two years, Angwin has been a Walter Shorenstein Media and Democracy Fellow at the Shorenstein Center, where she has researched how creators build trust with their audiences. In December 2024, she published “The Future of Trustworthy Information: Learning from Online Content Creators.”  She is a winner and two time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting for her work at The Wall Street Journal and ProPublica. She founded the nonprofit newsroom, The Markup in 2018 and the newsroom Proof News in 2024. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller “Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance” (Times Books, 2014) and “Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America” (Random House, March 2009). She is working on a new book “On Courage: To be a Dissident in America’s Age of Fear,” to be published by Harper Collins in 2026.

Her career has been devoted to pursuing rigorous methodologies and using code and data in journalistic investigations. Her landmark investigations into privacy at the Wall Street Journal pioneered the use of engineers to forensically examine digital surveillances. At ProPublica, she forged a new field of algorithmic accountability with investigations that revealed racial bias in criminal risk assessment algorithms and prompted several discrimination lawsuits against Facebook for its biased ad placement algorithms.  At the newsroom she founded, The Markup, she codified the practice of publishing rigorous methodologies and the code and data used in the newsroom’s analyses, so that anyone could check or refute the conclusions. At the journalism studio she founded, Proof News, she introduced “ingredients labels” for news to help readers understand what went into the reporting.

She earned a B.A. in mathematics from the University of Chicago, and an M.B.A. from the Graduate School of Business at Columbia University. In 2023, she was Entrepreneur in Residence at Columbia Journalism School’s Brown Institute for Media Innovation 

As a research center focused on the creation, distribution and impact of media on public life, the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy has, throughout its history, examined  the flows of information and its impact on society. In the past decade, the center has expanded its reach to become a home for multidisciplinary research on media and how it shapes people’s understanding of the world. Two years ago, the Center launched its Documentary Film in the Public Interest initiative to examine challenges facing the field in a period of intense financial and technological disruption. The new project in independent media represents a continued expansion of the center’s holistic research into some of the most vibrant and influential information sources of our time.