Syracuse University

Faculty Member, Mass Communication

John Ben Snow Professor

S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications

About

Pamela J. Shoemaker, Ph.D. (Wisconsin-Madison, 1982), is the John Ben Snow Professor, an endowed research chair, in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at the Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York, USA.  She was previously director of the School of Journalism at The Ohio State University and earlier was on the faculty of the Department of Journalism at The University of Texas at Austin. 

She holds the M.S. in communications and the B.S.J. in journalism from the Scripps School of Journalism in Ohio University (1972) and was named the L.J. Hortin Distinguished Alumna in 2006.

Her books include Gatekeeping Theory (with Tim Vos, 2009); News Around the World:  Practitioners, Content and the Public (with Akiba Cohen, 2006); How to Build Social Science Theories (with James Tankard and Dominic Lasorsa, 2004); Mediating the Message:  Theories of Influences on Mass Media Content (with Steve Reese, 1991, 1996); Gatekeeping (1991); and the Journalism Monograph Building a Theory of News Content (with Kay Mayfield, 1987).

Shoemaker has been co-editor (with Michael Roloff) of the top-ranked Sage journal Communication Research since 1997.  Earlier she was associate editor of Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly and has served on the editorial boards of many journals. 

Shoemaker has served as President of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication and received the 2007 Distinguished Educator Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Kreighbaum Under-40 Award for Achievement in Research, Teaching and Public Service.  She is included in Strathmore’s Who’s Who (14th edition).

She has also been the chair of the Mass Communication Division of the International Communication Association, and was chair of the Consortium of Communication Associations.  She is a member of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, the International Association for Mass Communication Research, and the National Communication Association.

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