Brendan R. Watson

Brendan Watson, a former multimedia journalist, is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Journalism Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina. He will graduate in May 2012.

Brendan is the co-author of three refereed articles, two book chapters, and the author or co-author of more than a dozen refereed papers, five of which were recognized as top papers. His primary research combines content analysis, survey, and demographic data, to examine how social structure affects communication about local issues involving conflict, particularly environmental contamination.

His dissertation is examining how variables such as Gulf Coast communities’ economic reliance on the oil industry shaped coverage of the BP oil spill. The dissertation will compare newspaper coverage and Tweets about the oil spill, addressing, among other questions, whether Twitter represents an alternative medium, or is shaped by similar social, political, and economic pressures as mainstream journalism.

Previously Brendan was a multimedia journalist at the St. Petersburg Times. He led many of the paper’s early experiments in multimedia reporting, including video reporting, podcasting and live-blogging major news events. He also trained the paper’s reporters and photographers, and has taught multimedia reporting seminars at Michigan State University, University of Maryland, and the Poynter Institute for Media Studies.

At Carolina, Brendan was instructor of record for Newswriting and for Audio-Video Information Gathering, an introductory multimedia reporting course. He is also a research assistant for Dr. Daniel Riffe, the Richard Cole Eminent Professor.