Benjamin J Toff

Benjamin Toff is an assistant professor at the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication and a faculty affiliate of the Center for the Study of Political Psychology at the University of Minnesota. He studies media audiences and political engagement, public opinion, and changing journalistic practices. From 2016-2017, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford where he led a still ongoing project examining attitudes toward news and media habits among people who largely reject conventional forms of news. He is also working on completing a book project, which examines the role played by quantitative survey data in news coverage of American politics. This work extends research conducted as part of his doctoral dissertation, which received the American Political Science Association’s E.E. Schattschneider Award for best doctoral dissertation in the field of American government. His work has been published or is forthcoming in the Journal of Communication, Perspectives on Politics, Political Communication, the International Journal of Public Opinion Research, Research and Politics, Journalism, and Journalism Studies. He received his PhD in political science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2016 and a BA in social studies from Harvard in 2005. Prior to entering academia, he worked as a journalist and researcher at The New York Times.