Dr. Robert E. Gutsche, Jr.
Associate Professor in Digital Culture, School of Communication and Multimedia Studies, Florida Atlantic University
Affiliated Graduate Faculty, Department of Geosciences
Strategic Lead, Political Communication and Public Opinion Research Lab
Visiting Professor
Faculty of Informatics, Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania
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About Me
Following a career in journalism, my research and teaching identifies insertions of power in the news in terms of racisms and inequalities through place-making, international and climate discourses, and technological innovations that serve as expressions of journalistic authority. My work expands beyond journalism to include digital cultures of social media, VR and AI, and political communication where I apply critical and cultural approaches to how digital content creators work as both power and change agents while adopting and reproducing authoritative and hegemonic explanations for local and world events.
I am an Associate Professor in Digital Culture in the School of Communication and Multimedia Studies at Florida Atlantic University in the U.S. and a Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Informatics at Vytautas Magnus University, in Lithuania. Previously, I was an Associate Professor (Senior Lecturer) in Critical Digital Media Practice at Lancaster University, in the U.K., where I was affiliated with the Data Science Institute, Centre for Alternatives to Social and Economic Inequalities, Centre for Mobilities Research, and the Institute for Social Futures. During my time at Lancaster, I also developed and oversaw academic programs in journalism and communication at University Academy 92 in Manchester, U.K.
Currently, I serve as Associate Editor of Journalism Practice, where I produce and host “The J Word: A Podcast by Journalism Practice.” Previously, I served as Assistant Professor in the Department of Journalism + Media at Florida International University, in the U.S., where I taught largely in its former Digital Media Studies program, researching and teaching immersive media cultures, entrepreneurialism in digital media, and about cultures associated with surveillance, social movements, and media systems.
As a journalist, my work has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Newsday, The Guardian, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and other regional and local news outlets in the U.S. I also cofounded the online non-profit Iowa Center for Public Affairs Journalism at the University of Iowa after helping to launch the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I am honored to have led initiatives in community engagement and collaboration with journalists, students, and citizens through virtual reality and other immersive media in storytelling and research, particularly at Florida International University, in Miami, and I have been recognized for such practice-led research that has been published in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Journalism Studies, Digital Journalism, Journalism Practice, Visual Communication, and other journals as a Digital Journalism Research Fellow in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at Oslo Metropolitan University in Norway, as a Tow-Knight Disruptive Educator at the City University of New York’s Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism, and as a Fellow at Lancaster University’s Institute for Social Futures, where I co-lead on the institute’s environmental futures research vein. I also led and contributed to dynamic storytelling research initiatives through the University of Missouri’s Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute.
I am the author and editor of several books, including Media Control: News as an Institution of Power and Social Control (Bloomsbury), The Trump Presidency, Journalism, and Democracy (Routledge), and The Future of the Presidency, Journalism, and Democracy: After Trump (Routledge). And, I am also a frequent media expert for international news stations about U.S. politics and media, having conducted more than 300 interviews for channels, including CNN, BuzzFeed, Deutsche Welle, Business Insider, CNBC, TRT, RT, France 24, Sky News, Al Jazeera, BBC radio, and Australia ABC. I am joined in life with my wife, our two sons, and our dog, Stella.
My Current Project
Tentatively-titled “Coloring between the lines: Imaginative power of personal media” is a critical autoethnography that extends my work on ideology, myth, and imaginative power in journalism to my lived media experiences and personal artifacts from the era surrounding the First Gulf War (1990). I connect these moments and media items – including a childhood coloring book given to be as a classroom coursework to learn U.S. history – through critical qualitative visual and textual analysis to speak to temporal complexities in the development of today’s social control via media landscapes beyond journalism, where my life and research has largely been centered.
The artifacts and experiences I interrogate surround my time in and with media, largely focusing on my childhood in rural white Wisconsin, a collection that includes a 9/11 commemorative coin, Gulf War trading cards, my father’s letters-to-the-editor about US Housing and Urban Development policy and my first (at 8-years-old) about Christmas fireworks at the local VA.
My interpretations surrounding these items and the cultural work being done in and through them to embed understandings of race, gender, “democracy” and “governance,” expression and assimilation reaches to experiences decades later — patriotic parades, international living, parenthood and professorship. I am particularly interested in interrogating reoccurring themes of racist oppression, American exceptionalism, hegemonic masculinity, and notions of belonging.
My writings related to this project aim to elevate critical interpretations of Western imperialism and media control through a reflexive journey through reflections on lifelong processes of indoctrination to anti-intellectualism and the erasing of critical and cultural theory. Therefore, this project speaks against ever-expanding normative evaluations within the social sciences, particularly concerning digital media and journalism — areas where I have been housed academically — and a failure for American academics, particularly those in my field of Journalism Studies — to resist the quantification of our meanings and normative interpretations of social and cultural roles and forms of the grand old Fourth Estate.
This autoethnography emerges from a conceptual position of where I left off in my 2017 Media Control manuscript. There, I argue understanding journalism as power and oppressive emerges not through a lens of conspiracy theory but as one through collusion. In this way, we see the journalistic community and its boundaries are not well defined around a system of hierarchies of influence but through a system where that boundary is porous and operates amid a functionality of the Power Elite, a system identified by C. Wright Mills. In this idea, military, business, media, and government work in unison to reproduce policies and philosophies to shape society.
Through this project, I explore these ideas through mixed media visual analysis and application of critical and Cultural Studies as a means to speak against — and perhaps to — audiences designed by distraction to dismiss the covert-as-overt and to see us as manifestations of the power reproduced by the media we consume and make across our lives.
Despite the detail I provide in theory, method, positionality, and interpretation the absence of the digital may be odd. The digital exists and so does the discussion. Indeed, the First Gulf War was a major excursion into digital technology for both war and media. The distribution and repetition of cultural messages and artifacts — a role handed over from Blockbuster and Sunday TV repeats to international syndication and social media remix to search and streaming – may appear through different symbols today. That’s not surprising. That the messages are similar in terms of ideological meaning and power isn’t either. But, to many, these banal forms of indoctrination come and go so quickly (as they are meant to) that audiences are too distracted to even notice beyond the common-sensical benefit of feeding what’s “already known.” Mine is a treatise, if you will, interested in the lasting, incessant and incestuous acts of media-and-party to repress and redact, reduce and renew, with moments of resistance operating under a pending premise of collective forgetting.
Education
University of Iowa
Ph.D., Mass Communication, 2012
Dissertation: Mediated constructions and lived experiences of place: An analysis of neighborhood news and mental mapping (recipient of the Gene Burd Urban Journalism Research Prize, Annual Dissertation Award from the Urban Communication Foundation and the Journalism Studies Division of the International Communication Association, 2013)
Graduate Certificate in Rhetoric of Inquiry, 2011
Concordia University Wisconsin
M.S., Student Personnel Administration, 2008
Thesis: Understanding newsmakers: Exploring themes of interest surrounding the development and experiences of college student journalists
University of Wisconsin-Madison
B.A., Journalism and Mass Communication, 2006
University of Wisconsin-Richland
A.A.S., 2001
Selected Academic & Administrative Experiences
Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Florida, USA
Associate Professor, School of Communication and Multimedia Studies, December 2022 – present
Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania
Visiting Professor, Faculty of Informatics, December 2021 – present
Lancaster University, Lancaster, United Kingdom
Associate Professor (Senior Lecturer in Critical Digital Media Practice, permanent contract), Department of Sociology/Media & Cultural Studies, January 2018 – December 2022
University Academy 92 (Lancaster University Joint Venture), Manchester, United Kingdom
Academic Link-Tutor, BAs in Journalism, Media and Communications, Sports Journalism, August 2019 – December 2022
Academic Lead, Journalism and Media and Communications programs, January 2018 – August 2019
Oslo Metropolitan University (OsloMet), Oslo, Norway
Digital Journalism Research Fellow, Department of Journalism and Media Studies, October 2018
Florida International University, Miami, Florida, USA
Assistant Professor, Department of Journalism + Media, August 2012 – January 2018
Affiliated Faculty, African & African Diaspora Studies Program; Sea Level Solutions Center; Latin American and Caribbean Center (until January 2018)
Founder & Faculty Lead, Mobile Virtual Reality Lab, June 2016 – January 2018
Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, Washington, D.C., USA
Research Consultant, December 2017 – March 2018
City University of New York, New York City, USA
Fellow, Tow-Knight Disruptive Educator, Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism, August 2017 – March 2018
University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri, USA
Research Scholar, Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute, June 2015 – June 2016
University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa, USA
Graduate Teaching Assistant/Instructor of Record, School of Journalism and Mass Communication, 2009 – 2012
Fellow, Obermann Graduate Institute on Engagement and the Academy, 2011
Journalism Instructor, Upward Bound Program, Summer 2011
Instructor and Counselor, Summer Journalism Workshop, Summers 2002, 2003
Concordia University Wisconsin, Mequon, Wisconsin, USA
Graduate Assistant, Graduate Business Studies / International Student Services, 2007 – 2008
Graduate Assistant, Vice President of Student Life, 2007 – 2008
University of Wisconsin-Richland, Richland Center, Wisconsin, USA
Assistant Lecturer and Student Newspaper Advisor, 2008 – 2009
Interim Student Services Coordinator, July 2008 – October 2008
Summer Program Counselor and Journalism Instructor, Summers 2000, 2001
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin, USA
Academic Advisor, Student Orientation and Registration, Summer 2008
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA
Journalism Instructor, Upward Bound/TRIO Program, Summer 2007
Academic Editorial Affiliations
Journal Editing
Host and Producer, The J Word: A Podcast by Journalism Practice, July 2020 – Present
Associate Editor, Journalism Practice, January 2018 – Present
Engagement Editor, Journalism Practice, October 2019 – January 2022
Book Reviews Editor, Journal of Communication Inquiry, 2011 – 2012
Associate Editor, Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, 2009 – 2012
Guest Editing
Journal of Environmental Media, “Seeing the (in)justice of sustainability: Visualizing inequality at the center of climate change communication,” (scheduled for 2022, with Zheng Cui and Juliet Pinto)
Journalism Practice (2022, 16[2/3], “Journalism, climate change, and reporting synergistic effects of the Anthropocene” (with Juliet Pinto)
Media and Communication (2021, 9[2], “Critical theory in a digital media world: Ways forward”
Journalism Practice (2019, 13[9]), “The state (and future) of television news and broadcast news studies: Theoretical perspectives, methodological problems, and practice” (special section)
Journalism Practice (2019, 13[8]), “Journalism research in practice: Scholarly inquiry for journalists” (with Bonnie Brennen)
Journalism and Mass Communication Educator(2019, 74[2]), “Teaching in post-truth: Challenges, lessons, and innovations in journalism education”
Journalism Studies (2018, 19[4]),“Contesting communities: Reimagining journalism and social order in a fragmented world” (with Kristy Hess)
Journalism Practice (2018, 12[2]), “Contesting communities: Reimagining journalism and social order in a fragmented world” (with Kristy Hess)
Editorial Boards
World of Media, November 2022 – present
Journal of Communication Inquiry, March 2021 – present
Journal of Environmental Media, February 2021 – present
Journalism and Media, September 2020 – Present
Media and Communication, June 2019 – Present
Journalism Practice, March 2014 – Present
Journalism and Mass Communication Educator, April 2013 – Present
Reviewer for Journals
Journalism Studies, Journal of Communication, Digital Journalism, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, Critical Studies in Media Communication, International Journal of Communication, Journal of Communication Inquiry, Memory Studies, Media, War & Conflict, Visual Communication, Visual Communication Quarterly, Australian Journalism Review, International Journal of Drug Policy, Mass Communication & Society, Media & Communication, Nordicom, Journalism and Media, Political Communication
Manuscript Reviewer
Bloomsbury, Routledge, Fairchild Books, Lexington Books, University of British Columbia Press
Professional Experience
Journalist, 1996 – Present
Cofounder, The Iowa Center for Public Affairs Journalism, 2009 – Present
Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, 2009
The Washington Post, 2004 – 2009 (freelance)
Madison Magazine, 2004 – 2009 (freelance)
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 2001 – 2009 (freelance)
Chicago Tribune, 2001 – 2009 (freelance)
The New York Times, 2003 – 2004 (freelance)
The (Racine, Wis.) Journal Times, 2005
Newsday, (Washington, D.C.), 2003
Wisconsin Public Television, 2003 – 2004
Wisconsin State Journal, 2000 – 2003 (staff and freelance)
Central Wisconsin Newspapers, 2000
Associated Press, 1999 – 2002 (freelance)
La Crosse (Wis.) Tribune, 1999 – 2001 (staff and freelance)
Tomah (Wis.) Journal, 1996 – 2001 (staff and freelance)
Homepage illustration by Jared Rodriquez from the cover of Media Control.
About Page photo: Discussing media representations on a 2015 panel with Soledad O’Brien about “Being Black in America.” Photo by Florida International University.
Headshot by Carolina Estrada.