Julie Posetti

Julie Posetti (PhD) is Director of the Information Integrity Initiative, a project of TheNerve, the digital forensics lab founded by Nobel Laureate Maria Ressa. She is also Chair of the Centre for Journalism and Democracy and Professor of Journalism at City, University of London. Additionally, she is a Research Associate at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ) at the University of Oxford. Previously was Senior Research Fellow at RISJ where she led the Journalism Innovation Project.

Prof. Posetti researches at the intersection of public interest media, disinformation, gender, journalism safety, Big Tech accountability, and freedom of expression. She is the author of Protecting Journalism Sources in the Digital Age (UNESCO 2017), the lead author of The Chilling (UNESCO-ICFJ 2021, 2022), and the co-editor of Journalism, ‘Fake News’ and Disinformation (UNESCO 2018) and Balancing Act: Responding to Disinformation While Respecting Freedom of Expression (UNESCO/ITU 2020). Her academic research has been published internationally in peer reviewed journals and scholarly books.

Prof. Posetti serves on the board of the International Fund for Public Interest Media (IFPIM), the Advisory Board for the Global Partnership for Action on Gender-Based Online Harassment and Abuse, and she is a member of the World Economic Forum's Global Future Council on Information Integrity.

Prof. Posetti brings over three decades of high-level international journalism practice to her research, including time as a news editor, documentary reporter and national political correspondent with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). In this capacity, she was awarded the Australian Human Rights Awards for Radio for her coverage of Indigenous affairs, the resurgence of the ‘racist right’, and systemic child abuse in state care. She was also a recipient of the Australian National Press Club’s ‘German Award for Journalism’. More recently, her work has been published by The Washington Post, CNN, The Atlantic, Harvard University’s Nieman Lab, the BBC, The Sydney Morning Herald, Foreign Policy and The Guardian.

She is also a former Research Fellow and Editor with the Paris-based World Association of News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) and the World Editors’ Forum, where she edited their flagship international industry report Trends in Newsrooms. She was Head of Digital Editorial Capability for Fairfax Media, publisher of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age 2016/2017. In this role, she facilitated and co-produced the investigative podcast series ‘Phoebe’s Fall’, which won gold at the New York Radio Festival, along with a host of other awards.

Known for her early research and reporting about the transformative impacts of social media practice on journalism (from the clash of private and public spheres, to new patterns of audience engagement, and challenges to traditional modes of verification), Posetti has also been at the forefront of understanding and documenting converging Digital Age threats to investigative journalism, in particular journalistic source confidentiality and online harassment.