Dr. Jennifer Midberry presents during our inaugural Better Gun Violence Reporting Summit at WHYY in Philadelphia in 2019.
Dr. Jennifer Midberry is the journalism research advisor at the Philadelphia Center for Gun Violence Reporting and an associate professor in the Department of Journalism at Temple University.
Jennifer was an author on our first study and has presented related research at meetings of the International Communications Association in Paris and Toronto, and at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication conference in Washington. She also wrote about our research agenda for the Temple University Faculty Herald, lectured on the topic at Temple’s Klein College of Media and Communication and presented during our inaugural Better Gun Violence Summit.
Her research agenda explores how journalism practice can be improved to create more ethical coverage of marginalized groups and be more effective at evoking audience empathy and engagement with important social issues. As a former photographer and photo editor, much of her work focuses on photojournalism and her projects are intended to have practical insights for visual journalists in addition to advancing visual communication and journalism theory.
She employs both qualitative and quantitative methods. She teaches Visual Communication, Photojournalism, Media Ethics, and Media & Society at Lehigh. Empowering her students to think critically about media representations and the role of journalism in addressing social problems is the goal that drives her teaching. Previous to her career in academia, she worked as a visual journalist for organizations such as The Philadelphia Daily News, the Associated Press, AOL News, and ABC News.