Dr. Christopher Ali is an Assistant Professor in Department of Media Studies. He joined the Department in the fall of 2013, after completing his PhD at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. He also holds degrees from Concordia University (Montreal, Canada – MA in Media Studies) and the University of Alberta (Edmonton, Canada – BA in Film & Media Studies and Sociology).

His research focuses on communication policy and regulation, critical political economy, critical geography, comparative media systems, localism, and local news. He has published in numerous internationally ranked academic journals including: Communication Theory, Media Culture & Society, and International Journal of Communication.

Christopher has worked for the Federal Communications Commission, submitted research for the Swiss Office of Communication, consulted with the South Korean Committee on the Impact of Media Concentration, and was part of a consortium of researchers, activists, and practitioners intervening at the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission regarding community and local media. In 2015 Christopher held the inaugural Gressly-Fleck visiting scholar fellowship in the Department for Communication and Media Research at the University of Fribourg, in Fribourg, Switzerland.

Christopher’s first book, Echoes of Gabriel Tarde: What we know better or different 100 years later was published by the USC Annenberg Press in 2014. Written with Elihu Katz and Joohan Kim, the book prefigures Gabriel Tarde as a founder of communication studies and traces his lineage in fields such as political communication, deliberative democracy, the diffusion of information, imagined communities, and the sociology of news.

His new book, Media Localism: The Policies of Place (University of Illinois Press, 2017) addresses the difficulties of defining and regulating local media in the 21st century in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada and the implications these difficulties have for the long-term viability of local news. This is the first book to investigate local media policy in a comparative context (US, UK, Canada), and the first to systematically assess media localism in Canada and the UK (it also updates the work on localism done in the US). It combines policy analysis and critical theory to provide for a unique perspective on one of the most challenging policy questions in the media industry: what does it mean to be local?

As a Fellow with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University in 2016-2017, Christopher has recently completed an intensive research project on the state of small market newspapers in the United States. The project investigated how small market newspapers are adapting to the new realities of digital technologies in everything from content, to platforms, to distribution and advertising. Titled “Local News in a Digital World: Small Market Newspapers in an era of Digital Disruption,” the first report was released in April 2017 and the second report in November 2017.

Currently, Christopher is working on a new book project, Farm Fresh Spectrum: Rural Interventions in Broadband Policy. This is an investigation into the relationship between farming communities, communication technologies, and broadband policy in the United States. Starting from the observation that farming has been constantly invoked in policy discourse over the last century but seldom investigated, the goal is to better understand the role that farming communities, along with their organizations, associations, and regulatory bodies (like the USDA) have played in shaping broadband policies – both past and present.