Dr. Christopher Ali, PhD

Assistant Professor – Department of Media Studies
University of Virginia

Dr. Christopher Ali is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. He holds a PhD from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on communication policy and regulation, localism, local news/local journalism, and critical theory. His current research project, Farm Fresh Spectrum: Rural Interventions in Broadband Policy, investigates rural broadband policy and funding sources, with a specific focus on broadband-to-the-farm. His first book, Media Localism: The Policies of Place (University of Illinois Press, 2017) addressed the difficulties of defining and regulating local media in the 21^st century in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada and the implications these difficulties have for the long-term viability of local news. Christopher is currently the Faculty Research Fellow at the Benton Foundation, and Academic Fellow with the World Economic Forum.

Christopher has worked for the Federal Communications Commission, submitted research to 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 2016-2017 Christopher was a Fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism researching the state of small market newspapers in the United States. Along with Damian Radcliffe he published two reports on the subject, including Local News in A Digital World: Small Market Newspapers in the Digital Age. In 2017 he was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.