Meg Heckman
Biographic Data
| ID | 4909379 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Meg Heckman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Meg |
| FAMILY NAME | Heckman |
| SIGNATURE | HECKMAN M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Northeastern University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0619-5171 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 7 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 12 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 7 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Powerful in pearls and Willie Brown’s mistress
This study uses a mix of traditional and computational content analysis to track digital news coverage of U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris during and immediately after the 2020 general elections. It’s well documented that female politicians, especially women of color, face biased coverage in the political press. In this paper, we explore how these dynamics play out in the modern hyper-polarized digital media landscape. Our corpus includes roughl…
Examining Gaps in Journalism Curriculum to Solve the News Desert Crisis
This exploratory study uses semi-structured, in-depth qualitative interviews ( n = 32) with journalism educators at universities in Europe, Australia, North America, and the South Pacific to examine the current state of local news pedagogy. While these journalism educators understand the significance of the news desert crisis, their efforts to engage their students around the issue often fall short. Using an ecological framework of system theory,…
It's Everybody's Problem
Women have been involved in the production of news since before the Revolutionary War, but their work is often overlooked or conscripted to the “pink ghetto” – a term used to describe the way women journalists have historically been confined to writing about feminine topics. This chapter explores the lack of gender diversity in newsrooms, explains how the profession’s macho culture persists despite the heroic efforts of barrier-breaking women jou…
Shifting the Archival Gaze
Through an interdisciplinary examination of a bourgeoning technology, this essay grapples with the opportunities and challenges of using a type of artificial intelligence called machine learning to catalog and make sense of the unpreceded number of digital materials now available to media historians. The authors—a journalism professor and an AI researcher—describe their recent interdisciplinary efforts to use machine learning to explore a collect…
A Discursive Evolution
Although diminishing newsrooms—and gaping holes in community news coverage—have been acknowledged in the US for over a decade, the term “news desert” did not widely emerge in discourse among industry professionals to refer to places that lacked news outlets until the fall of 2018. While much work in various disciplines, including journalism studies, aims to uncover the causes behind news deserts and the effects of their proliferation, scant resea…
Reimagining Journalistic Roles
Constructing the “Gender Beat
This exploratory, qualitative study documents how journalists working for U.S. news organizations defined and refined the concept of a “gender beat” in the aftermath of the 2017 resurgence of the #MeToo movement and several other major news events that illustrated the repercussions of structural sexism. Through semi-structured interviews with 20 self-described gender-beat journalists analyzed using constructivist grounded theory, I identified thr…
Reimagining Journalistic Roles
Powerful in pearls and Willie Brown’s mistress
This study uses a mix of traditional and computational content analysis to track digital news coverage of U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris during and immediately after the 2020 general elections. It’s well documented that female politicians, especially women of color, face biased coverage in the political press. In this paper, we explore how these dynamics play out in the modern hyper-polarized digital media landscape. Our corpus includes roughl…
A Discursive Evolution
Although diminishing newsrooms—and gaping holes in community news coverage—have been acknowledged in the US for over a decade, the term “news desert” did not widely emerge in discourse among industry professionals to refer to places that lacked news outlets until the fall of 2018. While much work in various disciplines, including journalism studies, aims to uncover the causes behind news deserts and the effects of their proliferation, scant resea…
Constructing the “Gender Beat
This exploratory, qualitative study documents how journalists working for U.S. news organizations defined and refined the concept of a “gender beat” in the aftermath of the 2017 resurgence of the #MeToo movement and several other major news events that illustrated the repercussions of structural sexism. Through semi-structured interviews with 20 self-described gender-beat journalists analyzed using constructivist grounded theory, I identified thr…
Reimagining Journalistic Roles
It's Everybody's Problem
Women have been involved in the production of news since before the Revolutionary War, but their work is often overlooked or conscripted to the “pink ghetto” – a term used to describe the way women journalists have historically been confined to writing about feminine topics. This chapter explores the lack of gender diversity in newsrooms, explains how the profession’s macho culture persists despite the heroic efforts of barrier-breaking women jou…
Shifting the Archival Gaze
Through an interdisciplinary examination of a bourgeoning technology, this essay grapples with the opportunities and challenges of using a type of artificial intelligence called machine learning to catalog and make sense of the unpreceded number of digital materials now available to media historians. The authors—a journalism professor and an AI researcher—describe their recent interdisciplinary efforts to use machine learning to explore a collect…
A Discursive Evolution
Although diminishing newsrooms—and gaping holes in community news coverage—have been acknowledged in the US for over a decade, the term “news desert” did not widely emerge in discourse among industry professionals to refer to places that lacked news outlets until the fall of 2018. While much work in various disciplines, including journalism studies, aims to uncover the causes behind news deserts and the effects of their proliferation, scant resea…
Examining Gaps in Journalism Curriculum to Solve the News Desert Crisis
This exploratory study uses semi-structured, in-depth qualitative interviews ( n = 32) with journalism educators at universities in Europe, Australia, North America, and the South Pacific to examine the current state of local news pedagogy. While these journalism educators understand the significance of the news desert crisis, their efforts to engage their students around the issue often fall short. Using an ecological framework of system theory,…
Powerful in pearls and Willie Brown’s mistress
This study uses a mix of traditional and computational content analysis to track digital news coverage of U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris during and immediately after the 2020 general elections. It’s well documented that female politicians, especially women of color, face biased coverage in the political press. In this paper, we explore how these dynamics play out in the modern hyper-polarized digital media landscape. Our corpus includes roughl…
Media Studies and Communication (6 works) · Political science (6 works) · Sociology (6 works) · Journalism (5 works) · Media studies (5 works) · Law (3 works) · Law (3 works) · News media (3 works) · Public relations (3 works) · Social science (3 works)