Chiku Ali
Biographic Data
| ID | 1446694 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Chiku Ali |
| GIVEN NAMES | Chiku |
| FAMILY NAME | Ali |
| SIGNATURE | ALI C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Virginia |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9688-1962 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 114 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
When Over-The-Top Is Over the Top: A Political Economic Analysis of Network Usage Fees in South Korea
This study investigates the disputes between global content providers (CPs) and South Korean Internet service providers (ISPs), notably SK Broadband (SKB), over network usage fees, which Korean ISPs argue global CPs—such as Google, Netflix, and Facebook—should pay because of the substantial network traffic they generate. Key cases include disputes between Facebook and the Korean Communications Commission (KCC), Netflix and SKB, and the Korean gov…
An island of trust: Public broadcasting in the United States
This contribution aims to better understand the level of and reasons for the trust U.S. television viewers place in the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) amidst what is often perceived as a general decline in trust in U.S. media and public institutions. Based on a nationwide survey of 1533 self-declared PBS viewers and rooted in theories of the conceptualization of organizational trust, our findings suggest that PBS viewers trust PBS along three …
Public media lobbying: The case of APTS
This paper focuses on the governance structure that links US public television station’s largest federal lobbying firm (America’s Public Television Stations or APTS) with the recently approved ATSC 3.0 broadcast standard, in which APTS is a major advocate. Using a political economic approach to understand the incentives and motivations behind seemingly contradictory APTS lobbying efforts, we interrogate a string of relationships between large ind…
Performative competition: The U.S. wireless communication market and the T-Mobile/Sprint merger
We examine the evolving political economy of the U.S. wireless communications market through a case study of the 2020T-Mobile/Sprint merger. Drawing on industry data from the Global Media & Internet Concentration Project and policy documents from the merger review, we show how the merging parties and regulators worked to construct the perception of competition to justify the transaction's approval despite clear evidence of oligopolistic concentra…
The “NextGen” of Subsumption: The Adoption of ATSC 3.0 by US Public Broadcasters
This paper offers a critical political economic analysis of the adoption of the ATSC 3.0 broadcast standard by public broadcasters in the US. ATSC 3.0 promises enhanced video and audio quality, and IP-enabled possibilities like mobile reception, emergency communication, datacasting, and 5G improvements. We argue that beneath the hype of ATSC 3.0, the widespread and faithful lobbying for the adoption of the standard by local stations as a means fo…
People, Power, Praxis: A Critical Qualitative Reminder to Policy Scholars and Makers
Background: This article reflects on the crucial contribution of critical qualitative research in communication policymaking. Analysis: This article draws on previous and current projects that use critical theory to analyze broadband policy in the United States and discusses methodological interventions of critical political economy, critical feminism, Marxism, and ethnographic approaches to policy. Conclusions and Implications: I use the hallmar…
Evidence-Based Pathways for Leveling Digital Access in Higher Education During and Beyond the Covid-19 Pandemic
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, policymakers’ attention focused heavily on K–12 student connectivity. By contrast, college students were largely “presumed connected,” even as they lost access to campus Wi-Fi, computer labs, and other digital resources. This study asks what lessons were learned and not learned by university administrators when it came to digital inequality on their campuses during the pandemic. To address this question, th…
Introduction: Information Access Practices
Access to information is riding a turbulent sea of costs, technology shifts, and ever-rising requirements for digital connectivity. Although the notion of information as a foundation of democracy seems commonplace in the United States, it took the COVID-19 pandemic to drive home the disarray of access around the country and across the globe. This collection of articles begins to grapple with some of the fine-grained issues around access.The broad…
Telecommunications localism: The fight for control over local communication networks in the United States
While called the "bedrock" and "cornerstone" of US media policy, the localism principle has been chipped away over 40 years by the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) full throated embrace of market-based practices. Recently, however, localism has emerged as a pivotal battleground in telecommunications. Through case studies of three recent regulatory issues-local cable franchising, municipal broadband, and small cell deployment-this paper e…
Lived Policy: Towards the Humanization of Telecommunications
This paper develops the concept of “lived policy” for the methodological toolkits of critical, qualitative communication policy scholars. Lived policy seeks to understand how public policies are lived by those impacted by them. It is inspired by research in “lived religion” and “lived theology” which connect theological studies with the lived realities of those who practice religion. Lived policy aims to humanize the policymaking process and the …
Universal Access and Its Asymmetries: The Untold Story of the Last 200 Years
In March 2021, President Biden announced the American Jobs Plan, a precursor to the trillion-dollar Infrastructure Act designed to kick-start the U.S. economy amid the global coronavirus pandemic. As part of the announcement, the President made a prophetic statement: “broadband is the new electricity” (White House 2021; Sawhney & Ekbia 2022, p. 3). Comparing the Internet and electricity connected the dots between a centuries-long experiment in un…
Desert Work: Life and Labor in a News and Broadband Desert
This study offers a systematic qualitative investigation inside a news and broadband desert. Despite popular attention to the ramifications of limitations of local news and internet access, most recently and acutely during the coronavirus pandemic, there has been no scholarly research into communities where these two deserts overlap. This article confronts this gap. Built on 19 in-depth interviews with residents of a rural East Coast county in th…
Come on f––er, just load!” Powerlessness, waiting, and life without broadband
Waiting is a way of experiencing the effects of power. This article finds those waiting for fixed broadband connection are powerless to end the waiting and increasingly frustrated with the powerful—the governmental officials, policy makers, and broadband providers—who control their waiting. This article, built on 19 interviews with residents of a rural county in the United States, details the lived experiences of those waiting for a fixed broadba…
Advanced Introduction to Platform Economics
Not All Doom and Gloom
Local news in the United States is threatened by forces beyond its control – a financial climate that no longer supports advertising-driven news production, a fragmented audience, and multi-media, multi-content environments demanded by both consumers and investors. In recent decades it has been local newspapers that have bared the brunt of these assaults. Within this turmoil, however, a more complex and nuanced understanding of American local new…
The Death of Broadcast Localism in the United States
The localism principle in US broadcasting policy refers to the belief that broadcasters should be responsible to, and reflective of, their communities of license. At certain times in its discordant history, this policy doctrine included community review boards, a physical station present in the community, publicly available logs, advantages to stations using unpopular local frequencies, and a limit on how many local television stations one compan…
When the Watchdog Neither Barks Nor Bites: Communication as a Power Resource in Media Policy and Regulation
Communication in policymaking and regulation has been of interest to political scientists for the last 15 years. Lamentably, the conceptualization and analysis of communication in media policymaking and regulation has yet to garner much attention from media policy scholars. Drawing on theories of power and new institutionalism, we address this paucity by introducing a theoretical and methodological approach that centers on the intersection of com…
The Digital Life of Small Market Newspapers: Results from a multi-method study
The established narrative around newspapers and their relationship with “digital” is predominantly gloomy. We’ve learned how newspapers missed the mark regarding digital distribution and how traditional working practices often led to slow adoption of digital tools. There’s merit in this, yet it is not the entire story. We are missing insights into the smallest newspapers. This paper contributes to this conversation through an investigation into t…
Searching for Sheboygans: On the future of small market newspapers
This article addresses the knowledge gap regarding small market newspapers in the United States. We address a deceptively simple research question: what is the state of small market newspapers in the United States as seen through the eyes of practitioners and industry experts? Based on in-depth interviews with experts and practitioners, we argue for a more nuanced vocabulary to describe newspapers and local news. Grouping all newspapers into a mo…
Media Localism: The Policies of Place
Local media is at a turning point. Legacy outlets – television and newspapers – are declining while emerging platforms are failing to take their place. When it comes to the policies and regulations governing local television, regulators are struggling to address audience gravitation and fragmentation, the declining commercial viability of broadcasting, and the ongoing crisis of journalism. In an era of digital platforms such as YouTube and Facebo…
The Merits of Merit Goods: Local Journalism and Public Policy in a Time of Austerity
Local journalism is often categorized by policymakers and academics as what neoclassical economists call a public good. The theory of public goods is used to describe journalism's nonrivalrous and nonexcludable characteristics and explain its positive externalities. Challenging this, I argue that the discourse of public goods is insufficient to fully capture the social democratic importance of local journalism. In its place, I call for a shift to…
A community of communities? Emerging dynamics in the community media paradigm
Recent years have seen numerous attempts by community broadcasters around the world to reinvent their practices in an effort to remain relevant and financially sustainable in the digital age. One proposed initiative is to have community programming distributed via satellite, either in the form of a single channel or as a subscription service for local stations to find programming. Combining two case studies and multiple research methods, this art…
Elite interviewing in media and communications policy research
This article critically examines the use of elite interviews in media and communications policy research. It addresses the fit between various analytical frameworks and elite interviews as a primary source of data, interviewee selection, access, the conduct of interviews and data analysis. It is argued that there is a lack of methodological explanation and reflection in our field of study. Partly, this is determined by the preferences of publishe…
Critical Regionalism and the Policies of Place: Revisiting Localism for the Digital Age
Local broadcasting is at a crossroads in Western media systems. While regulators work to address emergent challenges, an enduring tension within the discourse of local media regulation remains how to define “the local.” Stemming from the inability to meet this challenge, an artificial duality has emerged between communities of place and communities of interest within regulatory discussions. The larger epistemological question, therefore, remains …
The last PEG or community media 2.0? Negotiating place and placelessness at PhillyCAM
This article investigates the changes, challenges and opportunities present in American community media through a case study of PhillyCAM, a community television/media center in Philadelphia, PA. From this ethnographic study, it is suggested that community media navigate the tensions between television and digital media/user-generated content through reliance on place and liveness. In shifting from ‘community television’ to ‘community media’ thes…
Searching for Sheboygans: On the future of small market newspapers
This article addresses the knowledge gap regarding small market newspapers in the United States. We address a deceptively simple research question: what is the state of small market newspapers in the United States as seen through the eyes of practitioners and industry experts? Based on in-depth interviews with experts and practitioners, we argue for a more nuanced vocabulary to describe newspapers and local news. Grouping all newspapers into a mo…
Media Localism: The Policies of Place
Local media is at a turning point. Legacy outlets – television and newspapers – are declining while emerging platforms are failing to take their place. When it comes to the policies and regulations governing local television, regulators are struggling to address audience gravitation and fragmentation, the declining commercial viability of broadcasting, and the ongoing crisis of journalism. In an era of digital platforms such as YouTube and Facebo…
The Merits of Merit Goods: Local Journalism and Public Policy in a Time of Austerity
Local journalism is often categorized by policymakers and academics as what neoclassical economists call a public good. The theory of public goods is used to describe journalism's nonrivalrous and nonexcludable characteristics and explain its positive externalities. Challenging this, I argue that the discourse of public goods is insufficient to fully capture the social democratic importance of local journalism. In its place, I call for a shift to…
The Digital Life of Small Market Newspapers: Results from a multi-method study
The established narrative around newspapers and their relationship with “digital” is predominantly gloomy. We’ve learned how newspapers missed the mark regarding digital distribution and how traditional working practices often led to slow adoption of digital tools. There’s merit in this, yet it is not the entire story. We are missing insights into the smallest newspapers. This paper contributes to this conversation through an investigation into t…
When the Watchdog Neither Barks Nor Bites: Communication as a Power Resource in Media Policy and Regulation
Communication in policymaking and regulation has been of interest to political scientists for the last 15 years. Lamentably, the conceptualization and analysis of communication in media policymaking and regulation has yet to garner much attention from media policy scholars. Drawing on theories of power and new institutionalism, we address this paucity by introducing a theoretical and methodological approach that centers on the intersection of com…
Desert Work: Life and Labor in a News and Broadband Desert
This study offers a systematic qualitative investigation inside a news and broadband desert. Despite popular attention to the ramifications of limitations of local news and internet access, most recently and acutely during the coronavirus pandemic, there has been no scholarly research into communities where these two deserts overlap. This article confronts this gap. Built on 19 in-depth interviews with residents of a rural East Coast county in th…
Critical Regionalism and the Policies of Place: Revisiting Localism for the Digital Age
Local broadcasting is at a crossroads in Western media systems. While regulators work to address emergent challenges, an enduring tension within the discourse of local media regulation remains how to define “the local.” Stemming from the inability to meet this challenge, an artificial duality has emerged between communities of place and communities of interest within regulatory discussions. The larger epistemological question, therefore, remains …
Come on f––er, just load!” Powerlessness, waiting, and life without broadband
Waiting is a way of experiencing the effects of power. This article finds those waiting for fixed broadband connection are powerless to end the waiting and increasingly frustrated with the powerful—the governmental officials, policy makers, and broadband providers—who control their waiting. This article, built on 19 interviews with residents of a rural county in the United States, details the lived experiences of those waiting for a fixed broadba…
Elite interviewing in media and communications policy research
This article critically examines the use of elite interviews in media and communications policy research. It addresses the fit between various analytical frameworks and elite interviews as a primary source of data, interviewee selection, access, the conduct of interviews and data analysis. It is argued that there is a lack of methodological explanation and reflection in our field of study. Partly, this is determined by the preferences of publishe…
The last PEG or community media 2.0? Negotiating place and placelessness at PhillyCAM
This article investigates the changes, challenges and opportunities present in American community media through a case study of PhillyCAM, a community television/media center in Philadelphia, PA. From this ethnographic study, it is suggested that community media navigate the tensions between television and digital media/user-generated content through reliance on place and liveness. In shifting from ‘community television’ to ‘community media’ thes…
A broadcast system in whose interest? Tracing the origins of broadcast localism in Canadian and Australian television policy, 1950–1963
The television systems of Canada and Australia are often assumed to be similar if not synonymous. Both are dominated by American imports; rely on a networking of stations; and trace their media systems to a combination of American and British influence. Moreover, in the past decade, both have implemented tremendous changes to their broadcast policies, particularly with regard to local television. Yet despite these similarities, scholars have neve…
It is important to know that before, there was no lawalawa .” Working to stop female genital mutilation in Tanzania
This article is about efforts to unearth the facts about a myth in Tanzania about lawalawa, and the use of female genital mutilation (FGM) by some Tanzanian ethnic groups to cure lawalawa. The term lawalawa, used to describe certain vaginal and urinary tract infections, appeared soon after 1968, following the ban on FGM in the Arusha Declaration, and is still used today. When working with these ethnic groups on the subject of eliminating FGM, one…
Of Logos, Owners, and Cultural Intermediaries: Defining an Elite Discourse in Re-branding Practices at Three Private Canadian Television Stations
This article explores the relationship between local television stations and national networks through a careful study of station re-branding. The relationship is explored through case studies of the three privately owned English-speaking television stations in Winnipeg, Canada. Through in-depth interviews with station and network executives, the author investigates the critical factors that facilitated the re-branding of Canada’s private televis…
A broadcast system in whose interest? Tracing the origins of broadcast localism in Canadian and Australian television policy, 1950–1963
The television systems of Canada and Australia are often assumed to be similar if not synonymous. Both are dominated by American imports; rely on a networking of stations; and trace their media systems to a combination of American and British influence. Moreover, in the past decade, both have implemented tremendous changes to their broadcast policies, particularly with regard to local television. Yet despite these similarities, scholars have neve…
The last PEG or community media 2.0? Negotiating place and placelessness at PhillyCAM
This article investigates the changes, challenges and opportunities present in American community media through a case study of PhillyCAM, a community television/media center in Philadelphia, PA. From this ethnographic study, it is suggested that community media navigate the tensions between television and digital media/user-generated content through reliance on place and liveness. In shifting from ‘community television’ to ‘community media’ thes…
A community of communities? Emerging dynamics in the community media paradigm
Recent years have seen numerous attempts by community broadcasters around the world to reinvent their practices in an effort to remain relevant and financially sustainable in the digital age. One proposed initiative is to have community programming distributed via satellite, either in the form of a single channel or as a subscription service for local stations to find programming. Combining two case studies and multiple research methods, this art…
Elite interviewing in media and communications policy research
This article critically examines the use of elite interviews in media and communications policy research. It addresses the fit between various analytical frameworks and elite interviews as a primary source of data, interviewee selection, access, the conduct of interviews and data analysis. It is argued that there is a lack of methodological explanation and reflection in our field of study. Partly, this is determined by the preferences of publishe…
Critical Regionalism and the Policies of Place: Revisiting Localism for the Digital Age
Local broadcasting is at a crossroads in Western media systems. While regulators work to address emergent challenges, an enduring tension within the discourse of local media regulation remains how to define “the local.” Stemming from the inability to meet this challenge, an artificial duality has emerged between communities of place and communities of interest within regulatory discussions. The larger epistemological question, therefore, remains …
The Merits of Merit Goods: Local Journalism and Public Policy in a Time of Austerity
Local journalism is often categorized by policymakers and academics as what neoclassical economists call a public good. The theory of public goods is used to describe journalism's nonrivalrous and nonexcludable characteristics and explain its positive externalities. Challenging this, I argue that the discourse of public goods is insufficient to fully capture the social democratic importance of local journalism. In its place, I call for a shift to…
Media Localism: The Policies of Place
Local media is at a turning point. Legacy outlets – television and newspapers – are declining while emerging platforms are failing to take their place. When it comes to the policies and regulations governing local television, regulators are struggling to address audience gravitation and fragmentation, the declining commercial viability of broadcasting, and the ongoing crisis of journalism. In an era of digital platforms such as YouTube and Facebo…
When the Watchdog Neither Barks Nor Bites: Communication as a Power Resource in Media Policy and Regulation
Communication in policymaking and regulation has been of interest to political scientists for the last 15 years. Lamentably, the conceptualization and analysis of communication in media policymaking and regulation has yet to garner much attention from media policy scholars. Drawing on theories of power and new institutionalism, we address this paucity by introducing a theoretical and methodological approach that centers on the intersection of com…
The Digital Life of Small Market Newspapers: Results from a multi-method study
The established narrative around newspapers and their relationship with “digital” is predominantly gloomy. We’ve learned how newspapers missed the mark regarding digital distribution and how traditional working practices often led to slow adoption of digital tools. There’s merit in this, yet it is not the entire story. We are missing insights into the smallest newspapers. This paper contributes to this conversation through an investigation into t…
Searching for Sheboygans: On the future of small market newspapers
This article addresses the knowledge gap regarding small market newspapers in the United States. We address a deceptively simple research question: what is the state of small market newspapers in the United States as seen through the eyes of practitioners and industry experts? Based on in-depth interviews with experts and practitioners, we argue for a more nuanced vocabulary to describe newspapers and local news. Grouping all newspapers into a mo…
Not All Doom and Gloom
Local news in the United States is threatened by forces beyond its control – a financial climate that no longer supports advertising-driven news production, a fragmented audience, and multi-media, multi-content environments demanded by both consumers and investors. In recent decades it has been local newspapers that have bared the brunt of these assaults. Within this turmoil, however, a more complex and nuanced understanding of American local new…
The Death of Broadcast Localism in the United States
The localism principle in US broadcasting policy refers to the belief that broadcasters should be responsible to, and reflective of, their communities of license. At certain times in its discordant history, this policy doctrine included community review boards, a physical station present in the community, publicly available logs, advantages to stations using unpopular local frequencies, and a limit on how many local television stations one compan…
Advanced Introduction to Platform Economics
Desert Work: Life and Labor in a News and Broadband Desert
This study offers a systematic qualitative investigation inside a news and broadband desert. Despite popular attention to the ramifications of limitations of local news and internet access, most recently and acutely during the coronavirus pandemic, there has been no scholarly research into communities where these two deserts overlap. This article confronts this gap. Built on 19 in-depth interviews with residents of a rural East Coast county in th…
Come on f––er, just load!” Powerlessness, waiting, and life without broadband
Waiting is a way of experiencing the effects of power. This article finds those waiting for fixed broadband connection are powerless to end the waiting and increasingly frustrated with the powerful—the governmental officials, policy makers, and broadband providers—who control their waiting. This article, built on 19 interviews with residents of a rural county in the United States, details the lived experiences of those waiting for a fixed broadba…
Lived Policy: Towards the Humanization of Telecommunications
This paper develops the concept of “lived policy” for the methodological toolkits of critical, qualitative communication policy scholars. Lived policy seeks to understand how public policies are lived by those impacted by them. It is inspired by research in “lived religion” and “lived theology” which connect theological studies with the lived realities of those who practice religion. Lived policy aims to humanize the policymaking process and the …
Universal Access and Its Asymmetries: The Untold Story of the Last 200 Years
In March 2021, President Biden announced the American Jobs Plan, a precursor to the trillion-dollar Infrastructure Act designed to kick-start the U.S. economy amid the global coronavirus pandemic. As part of the announcement, the President made a prophetic statement: “broadband is the new electricity” (White House 2021; Sawhney & Ekbia 2022, p. 3). Comparing the Internet and electricity connected the dots between a centuries-long experiment in un…
Evidence-Based Pathways for Leveling Digital Access in Higher Education During and Beyond the Covid-19 Pandemic
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, policymakers’ attention focused heavily on K–12 student connectivity. By contrast, college students were largely “presumed connected,” even as they lost access to campus Wi-Fi, computer labs, and other digital resources. This study asks what lessons were learned and not learned by university administrators when it came to digital inequality on their campuses during the pandemic. To address this question, th…
Introduction: Information Access Practices
Access to information is riding a turbulent sea of costs, technology shifts, and ever-rising requirements for digital connectivity. Although the notion of information as a foundation of democracy seems commonplace in the United States, it took the COVID-19 pandemic to drive home the disarray of access around the country and across the globe. This collection of articles begins to grapple with some of the fine-grained issues around access.The broad…
Telecommunications localism: The fight for control over local communication networks in the United States
While called the "bedrock" and "cornerstone" of US media policy, the localism principle has been chipped away over 40 years by the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) full throated embrace of market-based practices. Recently, however, localism has emerged as a pivotal battleground in telecommunications. Through case studies of three recent regulatory issues-local cable franchising, municipal broadband, and small cell deployment-this paper e…
An island of trust: Public broadcasting in the United States
This contribution aims to better understand the level of and reasons for the trust U.S. television viewers place in the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) amidst what is often perceived as a general decline in trust in U.S. media and public institutions. Based on a nationwide survey of 1533 self-declared PBS viewers and rooted in theories of the conceptualization of organizational trust, our findings suggest that PBS viewers trust PBS along three …
Public media lobbying: The case of APTS
This paper focuses on the governance structure that links US public television station’s largest federal lobbying firm (America’s Public Television Stations or APTS) with the recently approved ATSC 3.0 broadcast standard, in which APTS is a major advocate. Using a political economic approach to understand the incentives and motivations behind seemingly contradictory APTS lobbying efforts, we interrogate a string of relationships between large ind…
Performative competition: The U.S. wireless communication market and the T-Mobile/Sprint merger
We examine the evolving political economy of the U.S. wireless communications market through a case study of the 2020T-Mobile/Sprint merger. Drawing on industry data from the Global Media & Internet Concentration Project and policy documents from the merger review, we show how the merging parties and regulators worked to construct the perception of competition to justify the transaction's approval despite clear evidence of oligopolistic concentra…
Political science (22 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Media Studies and Communication (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Business (10 works) · Politics (10 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Public relations (9 works) · ICT Impact and Policies (6 works)