Growing numbers globally are disengaging from news despite unprecedented access. Use is down, interest in decline, and news avoidance on the rise. In this talk, we share findings from our new book Av...
Benjamin Toff
Benjamin Toff is an Assistant Professor at the Hubbard School of Journalism & Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota and the Director of the Minnesota Journalism Center. He studies public opinion, political communication, digital media, and changing journalistic practices. His book Avoiding the News: Reluctant Audiences for Journalism (Columbia University Press, 2024), co-authored with Ruth Palmer and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, explores the public’s declining interest in and disengagement from news and journalism.
From 2020-2023, he was a Senior Research Fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford where he led a multi-country study on trust in news. His research has been published in the Journal of Communication, Public Opinion Quarterly, Political Communication, Journalism Studies, and elsewhere.
He received his doctorate in political science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a bachelor’s degree in social studies from Harvard University. In between, he worked as a professional journalist, mostly as a researcher at the New York Times.
