Richard Fletcher is Director of Research at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. He is primarily interested in global trends in digital news consumption, comparative media research, the use of social media by journalists and news organizations, and more broadly, the relationship between technology and journalism. Richard is lead researcher and co-author of the Digital News Project – the world's largest annual survey of global news consumption. Richard also uses this survey data to underpin comparative cross-national research into patterns of news consumption, audience fragmentation and polarisation, the effects of search engines and social media on news use, trust in the news, and paying for digital news.

Before arriving at Oxford, Richard was a Junior Research Fellow in the Department of Journalism at City University London. Here he worked on the development and evaluation of SocialSensor – a tool designed to allow journalists to collect, process, and aggregate large streams of social media data in order to discover trends, events, influencers, and interesting media content.

Richard’s original undergraduate and employment background was in computer science. Since then he has completed an MSc in Science, Medicine, Technology and Society from Imperial College London and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Surrey.

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