Summer Harlow

Associate Director, Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas

Summer Harlow is the associate director of the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas and a visiting associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin. A former journalist, her research examines the challenges and opportunities for alternative media, independent journalism, and activism brought on by emerging technologies, particularly in Latin America and the Global South. She has written two books: “Digital Native News and the Remaking of Latin American Mainstream and Alternative Journalism” (Routledge, 2023), which won the Kappa Tau Alpha Frank Luther Mott book award for best journalism and mass communication research and the AEJMC-Knudson Latin America book prize, and “Liberation Technology in El Salvador: Re-appropriating Social Media among Alternative Media Projects” (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2017), which also won the Knudson prize. She also edited the ebook Content Creators and Journalists: Redefining News and Credibility in the Digital Age, which the Knight Center published in 2024.

Her research has been published in top peer-reviewed journals such as the Journal of Communication, International Journal of Press/Politics, New Media & Society, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, and Digital Journalism. Currently, she is the primary investigator for El Salvador in the Worlds of Journalism Study and the Journalistic Role Performance Project. She also is an associate editor for the Journalism Studies journal.