Jodi McFarland Friedman

Jodi McFarland Friedman is a doctoral candidate. Her Ph.D. cognate is in the Communication Department; she has earned a certificate in Digital Studies. Friedman’s dissertation, “Shift the Gaze and Contest Power: How ‘Others’ Disrupt Narratives in News & Digital Media,” builds on cross-disciplinary theories of communication and media. Its multiple case studies include digital ethnographies of social media platforms. Its chapters examine the online communicative practices of those who use those platforms for social, cultural and political disruption, and how their use of those platforms is complicated by algorithms and artificial intelligence.

Friedman is a digital humanities scholar and teacher of skills, theory and general education classes. She has presented conference papers more than a dozen times and won multiple conference awards, including Best Student Paper, Best Abstract and an Outstanding Research award. That latter paper has since been published in Journalism History. She is a lead fellow of the University of Maryland Honors College, co-designing the course “Democracy’s Last Defense: The Power of Images” to address how visuals shape national narratives. 

In addition, as the Philip Merrill College of Journalism's coordinator of the Maryland Democracy Initiative, Friedman researches voter information habits and organized the conference Truth Under Siege in spring 2025. Friedman led award-winning midsize daily and digital newsrooms in Michigan including The Flint Journal, The Saginaw News and The Bay City Times. She was the first woman editor of The Saginaw News and taught journalism for a combined five years at Central Michigan and Oakland universities. 

Areas of Interest

• Digital journalism and AI
• Popular culture and communication
• Applied journalism and news norms
• Power, privilege and oppression
• Media literacy and history

Education

• B.A. (Communication and Spanish), Hope College
• M.A., University of Missouri

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