Daniel Kreiss

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Daniel Kreiss’ research explores the impact of technological change on the public sphere and political practice. In his 2012 book from Oxford University Press — “Taking Our Country Back: The Crafting of Networked Politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama” — Kreiss presents the untold history of new media and Democratic political campaigning over the last decade. The book follows the work of a group of young Internet staffers who came together on the Dean campaign and created a number of innovations in online campaigning. After the elections, Dean's former staffers launched prominent political consulting firms that carried their innovations to many other campaigns, including Obama's bid for the presidency.

Kreiss published a second book in 2016 entitled “Prototype Politics: The Making and Unmaking of Technological Innovation in the Republican and Democratic Parties, 2000-2014." The book explores the role of digital media, data and analytics in contemporary campaigning, and provides an explanatory framework for understanding the differences in the two parties’ technological capacities.

In addition to this work on institutional electoral processes and political campaign and party organizations, Kreiss has published a number of articles and chapters that analyze the effects of changing media environments on the organization and practice of journalism. This includes a series of works that argue for the value of journalistic autonomy and detail regulatory, institutional and technological means to secure it as well as the technologies that underlie contemporary political representation and journalistic production. These studies make an empirical and analytical contribution to scholarly understanding of how journalism is changing in an age of networked media. As importantly, they make a normative case for what journalism should be in an era of declining revenues for many media outlets, yet increasing needs of the democratic public.

Before coming to Carolina, Kreiss was a postdoctoral associate in law and fellow of the Information Society Project — an intellectual center at Yale Law School addressing the implications of new information technologies for law and society. Kreiss' research has appeared in New Media & Society, Critical Studies in Media Communication, the Journal of Information Technology and Politics, and the International Journal of Communication, among other journals.