About Me

Jennifer R. Henrichsen is an Assistant Professor at the Edward R. Murrow College of Communication at Washington State University. She is also an Affiliated Fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. In August 2021, she received her Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. 

Henrichsen's research examines how adversaries exploit weaknesses in the spread of information across organizations and institutions to contaminate the information ecosystem and to erode trust in knowledge systems. Specifically, she assesses how these and other challenges – from state and corporate surveillance to physical and digital attacks against the media – are creating an epistemic crisis for journalism. Her dissertation research examined journalistic intransigence to change and what that means for journalism and its role in democracy.

Henrichsen’s research has been published in top peer-reviewed journals, including Digital Journalism, Journalism Practice, Communication, Culture & Critique, Media, War & Conflict, and the Journal of Global Indigeneity. In 2019, she received a top student paper award from the journalism studies division of the International Communication Association for her paper "Reconceptualizing Indigenous Journalism through Information Poverty Theory.” She twice has been a consultant to UNESCO where she produced global reports on the state of journalism and she has served as a consultant to the Knight Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Ford Foundation. She is currently on the Advisory Council for the Open Technology Fund and she previously served on the Steering Committee for the Center for Media at Risk at Annenberg. Henrichsen has written articles about journalism and information security for Columbia Journalism Review and Poynter and she was previously a freelance journalist and a political correspondent.

Henrichsen has received fellowships from Yale, Columbia University, the Knight Foundation and First Look Media. A Fulbright Research Scholar, Jennifer holds MA degrees from the University of Geneva and the University of Pennsylvania. In 2011, she co-wrote the book, War on Words: Who Should Protect Journalists? (Praeger) and in 2017 she co-edited the book, Journalism After Snowden: The Future of the Free Press in a Surveillance State (Columbia University Press). She is currently co-editing the book, National Security, Journalism and Law in the Age of Information Warfare, which is forthcoming with Oxford University Press.