Joseph Turow

Research on digital cultural industries, especially at  the intersection of the internet, marketing, and society. Studies on database  marketing, media and privacy, digital out-of-home media, the process of  innovation in the mass media, and the relationship between media and the  medical system.

Professor Turow is an elected Fellow of the International Communication Association and was presented with a Distinguished Scholar Award by the National Communication Association. A 2005 New York Times Magazine article referred to Professor Turow as “probably the reigning academic expert on media fragmentation.” In 2012, the TrustE internet privacy-management organization designated him a "privacy pioneer" for his research and writing on marketing and digital-privacy.

He has authored nine books, edited five books, and written more than 150 articles on mass media industries. His most recent book, from Yale University Press (early 2012), is The Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry is Defining Your Identity and Your Worth. In 2010 the University of Michigan Press published Playing Doctor: Television, Storytelling and Medical Power. A history of prime time TV and the sociopolitics of medicine, it won the 2013 McGovern Health Communication Award from the University Of Texas College Of Communication. Routledge recently published the fifth edition of his text Media Today: An Introduction to Mass Communication. Other books reflecting current interests areNiche Envy: Marketing Discrimination in the Digital Age (MIT Press, 2006). Breaking Up America: Advertisers and the New Media World (University of Chicago Press, 1997; paperback, 1999; Chinese edition 2004); and The Hyperlinked Society: Questioning Connections in the Digital Age (edited with Lokman Tsui, University of Michigan Press, 2008).

Professor Turow’s continuing national surveys of the American public on issues relating to marketing, new media, and society have received a great deal of attention in the popular press as well as in the research community. He has written about media and advertising for the popular press, including American Demographics magazineThe Washington Post,Boston Globe and The Los Angeles Times. His research has received financial support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Kaiser Family Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Federal Communications Commission and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among others.

Professor Turow was awarded a Lady Astor Lectureship by Oxford University. He has received a number of conference paper and book awards, has lectured widely and been invited to give the Pockrass Distinguished lecture at Penn State University and to be a Chancellor's Distinguished Lecturer at LSU. He has served as the elected chair of the Mass Communication Division of the International Communication Association. Professor Turow currently serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media and Poetics.

Affiliations

Communication