Keegan Clements-Housser

Keegan Clements-Housser is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism, with a specialty in engaged journalism and building trust between newsrooms and their communities. Before attending Merrill College, he earned his M.S. in Strategic Communication from the University of Oregon Portland, where his thesis and capstone focused on exploring how citizen and professional journalism could complement one another, rather than competing with one another. Before entering into his Ph.D. program at Maryland, he spent a decade as a journalist, media analyst and consultant in Portland, Oregon. He was a research assistant at Urbanism Next, a University of Oregon-based research center focused on investigating the impacts of automation and e-commerce on urban planning and design. He was also project manager at Gather, an Agora Journalism Center-based project and platform to support community-minded journalists and other engagement professionals.

Clements-Housser's career as a journalist began while he was studying for his B.S. in Journalism at the University of Oregon, where he wrote, edited for and eventually managed or ran a variety of independent and nonprofit collegiate publications. Some of the award-winning collegiate news outlets his work appears in include The Daily Emerald, Ethos magazine, Flux magazine, Envision Journalism, and OR Media. During and after graduation he also worked or freelanced professionally for a number of news outlets, including KVAL (CBS), Portland Monthly magazine and Earth Touch. In his capacity as a media analyst and consultant, Clements-Housser worked with a variety of nonprofit and higher education organizations, including environmental advocacy nonprofit Not 1 More Acre! and the aforementioned Urbanism Next, the latter of which he would go on to join as a research assistant.

Clements-Housser's current research focus is on mapping and bridging the rigor-relevance divide or the “knowledge gap” between practicing journalists and journalism scholars. He recently co-authored a journal article in Journalism entitled “Journalists’ views on the research-practice gap” that explores this topic, and his current dissertation research aims to assess the viability of interventions aimed at bridging said gap. His other scholarly work and interests include civic and public journalism, the propagation of conspiracy theories through news media and the role of citizen-produced open-source intelligence (OSINT) in modern conflicts.

Areas of Interest

• Scholar-practitioner knowledge gaps in journalism
• Engaged and solutions journalism
• Public trust in media
• Citizen journalism
• Public & civic journalism
• Mixed-methods research

Education

• B.S. (Journalism), University of Oregon
• M.S. (Strategic Communication), University of Oregon Portland