research + writing.

“Research is formalized curiosity.

It is poking and prying with a purpose.”

—zora neale hurston

Dr. Allissa V. Richardson studies how African Americans use mobile and social media to produce their own news networks—especially in times of crisis. Her current work explores the lives of Black citizen journalists. With their permission, she wades through their Tweets, smartphone footage, Instagram posts, blogs and more, to see if their news coverage mirrors or contradicts legacy media narratives. She develops new theories to describe how their style of journalism works. And, perhaps most importantly, she situates their “looking” along a historical continuum, to illustrate how journalism has been a major component of Black protest for more than 200 years.

Dr. Richardson’s home base is USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, where she holds a dual appointment in both departments. She was a 2020-21 research fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, and at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism. She is an affiliated researcher with NYU’s Center for Critical Race + Digital Studies too.

Dr. Richardson “conferences” at the annual International Communication Association (ICA) gatherings, where she is part of the Journalism Studies and Activism + Social Justice divisions. She is on the editorial boards for Digital Journalism, International Journal of Communication and Journalism Practice.

books.

Richardson, Allissa V. (2020). Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, Smartphones and the New Protest #Journalism. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

peer-reviewed journal articles.

Allissa V. Richardson and Miya Williams Fayne. (2024). Conquering the COVID-19 infodemic: How the digital Black Press battled racialized misinformation in 2020. Digital Journalism. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2024.2338374.

Williams Fayne, Miya and Allissa V. Richardson. (2023). Reporting on Black Lives Matter in 2020: How Digital Black Press Outlets Covered the Racial Uprisings. International Journal of Press/Politics. DOI: 10.1177/19401612231187562.

Chang, H0-Chun H., Richardson, Allissa V., and Emilio Ferrara. (2022). Justice for George Floyd: How Instagram facilitated the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. PLOS ONE.

Richardson, Allissa V. (2021). Black bodies at risk: Exploring the embodied protest journalism of the anti-police brutality movement. Journalism. Invited to join Special Issue: UGC and News Epistemologies of Conflict Reporting. DOI: 10.1177/14648849211064072.

Richardson, Allissa V. (2020). The coming archival crisis: How ephemeral video disappears protest journalism & threatens newsreels of tomorrow. Digital Journalism 8(10): 1338-1346, DOI: 10.1080/21670811.2020.1841568.

Richardson, Allissa. V. (2020). The “Good News”: How the Gospel of Anti-Respectability Is Shaping Black Millennial Christian Podcasting. Fire!!!, 6(1), 67-97. Selected for Special Issue: Theorizing the Digital Black Church.

Richardson, Allissa V. (2020). Endless mode: Exploring the procedural rhetoric of a Black Lives Matter-themed newsgame. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. Selected for Special Issue: Playful approaches to news engagement.

Richardson, Allissa V. (2019). Dismantling respectability: The rise of new womanist communication models in the era of Black Lives Matter. Journal of Communication.

Richardson, Allissa V. (2016). Bearing witness while black: Theorizing African American mobile journalism after Ferguson. Digital Journalism 5(6): 673-698.

Richardson, Allissa V. (2016). The Platform: How Pullman porters used railways to engage in networked journalism after the Great War. Journalism Studies 17(4): 398-414.

commissioned reports

Richardson, Allissa V. (2021). Trends in digital citizen journalism: Bearing witness, building movements, and crafting counternarratives. Just Tech: Media & Democracy. Brooklyn, NY: Social Sciences Research Council.

Richardson, Allissa V. (2020). When video vanishes: How ephemeral social media platforms disappear protest journalism. Items: Insights from Social Sciences. Brooklyn, NY: Social Sciences Research Council.

peer-reviewed book chapters.

Richardson, A.V. (2024). Social media, citizen reporting and journalism. In Pavlik, J. (Ed.), Milestones in Digital Journalism, pp. 71-88. New York, NY: Routledge.

Richardson, Allissa V. (2022). Foreword. In Regina Lawrence (Ed.), The Politics of Force: Media and the Construction of Police Brutality, Updated Edition, xi-xiii. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Richardson, Allissa V. (2022). Witnessing George Floyd: Tracing Black mobile journalism’s rise, impact and enduring questions. In Stuart Allan (Ed.), The Routledge Companion to News and Journalism, pp. 161-169. New York, NY: Routledge.

Richardson, Allissa V. (2019). Black Lives Matter and the rise of womanist news narratives. In Carter, Cynthia, Linda Steiner and Stuart Allan (Eds.), Journalism, Gender and Power, pp. 221-235. New York, NY: Routledge.

Richardson, Allissa V. (2018). The Movement and its mobile journalism: A phenomenology of Black Lives Matter journalist-activists, pp. 387-400. In Eldridge, Scott A. & Bob Franklin (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Developments in Digital Journalism Studies. New York, NY: Routledge.

docuseries.

Richardson, Allissa V. Subject matter expert. In Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s (E.P.) Making Black America: Through the Grapevine. 2022. Limited docuseries. USA: PBS.

Glass, Alton; Davis-McGee, Adam; McCoy, Paris; and Richardson, Allissa V. Co-executive producers. In Protest: Grassroots Stories from the Frontlines. 2020-2021. Virtual reality limited docuseries. USA: Facebook Watch/Oculus TV. 

s1 | [In Protest: Minneapolis & St. Paul]: e1—First Response; e2—Art of the Movement; e3—Comfort for the Culture

s2 | [In Protest: Washington, DC]: e1—Tactical Broadcast; e2—Get in Where You Fit In; e3—Digital Justice; e4—Weaponizing the Vote

s3 | [In Protest: Los Angeles]: e1—Generational Uprising; e2—Compton Cowboys; e3—Fight for Your Freedom

s4 | [In Protest: Minneapolis & St. Paul]: e1—Kill Your Masters; e2—A Protest is Not a Riot; e3—Remembering the God in Us

book reviews.

Richardson, Allissa V. (2018). The Poitier effect: Racial melodrama and fantasies of reconciliation, by Sharon Willis. The Black Scholar 48(1): 78-80.

Richardson, Allissa V. (2017). The myth of post-racialism in television news, by Libby Lewis. The Black Scholar 47(3): 85-87.

Richardson, Allissa V. (2016). Please Forward: How Blogging Reconnected New Orleans After Katrina, by Cynthia Joyce. Journalism and Mass Communication Educator 71(3): 382-384.

op-eds.

Richardson, Allissa V. (2021). We have enough proof. What’s the purpose of sharing violent police videos anymore, other than to traumatize Black communities? Vox.

Richardson, Allissa V. (2021). The meaning of Amanda Gorman: How the poet laureate’s rise illuminates a lasting heritage of Black women’s activism. Center for Health Journalism Blog. Los Angeles, CA: USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

Richardson, Allissa V. (2020). It wasn’t a gun: A material archive of police violence. The Atlantic.

Richardson, Allissa V. (2020). In California, a history of young, powerful voices in journalism emerge. KCET.

Richardson, Allissa V. (2020). The problem with police-shooting videos. The Atlantic.

Richardson, Allissa V. (2020). Why cellphone videos of black people’s deaths should be considered sacred, like lynching photographs. The Conversation.

Richardson, Allissa V. (2020). Smartphone witnessing becomes synonymous with Black patriotism after George Floyd’s death. The Conversation.

Richardson, Allissa V. (2015). Mobile journalism goes virtual. Nieman Lab: 2016 Predictions for Journalism. 

Richardson, Allissa V. (2012). Mobile journalism: A model for the future. Diverse Issues in Higher Education.

lesson plans.

Richardson, Allissa V. (2016). #SayHerName: A lesson plan. Teaching Media Quarterly 4 (1): 1-6.