Benjamin Toff

Associate Professor, University of Minnesota
Director, Minnesota Journalism Center

Benjamin Toff is an associate professor at the Hubbard School of Journalism & Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota where he is also director of the Minnesota Journalism Center. His research focuses on the public’s changing relationship with news as well as its political implications, and he is co-author of “Avoiding the News: Reluctant Audiences for Journalism” (2023, Columbia University Press).

Previously he was a senior research fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford where he led the Trust in News Project, a 3-year study of the factors driving trust and distrust toward news media in Brazil, India, the UK, and the U.S. He holds a PhD in political science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a BA in social studies from Harvard University, and in between he worked for six years at The New York Times.