3. Digital Health Communication and Punk Rock Academics with Ethan Zuckerman

In this episode, we talk to Ethan Zuckerman, associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he teaches public policy, communication, and information. We discuss his paper "Digital Health Communication and Global Public Influence: A Study of the Ebola Epidemic" which was published in the Journal of Health Communication in 2017. His co-authors on this paper include technical and visualization experts (Hal Roberts and Sands Alden Fish II), a global public health expert (Brittany Seymour), and expert in education policy (Emily Robinson). Ethan talks about creating Media Cloud--an open-source platform for media analysis that tracks millions of stories published online--over the course of two decades and the "fearsome process" of scaling it up. He also discussed with us being an unconventional "punk-rock" academic and advice to "scratch your deep itch" when it comes to choosing which research directions to pursue. Link: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10810730.2016.1209598