Events
Search Mastery Speaker Series: “Search and the News”
Event Start Date: Wednesday, February 12, 2025 - 11:00 am
Event End Date: Wednesday, February 12, 2025 - 12:00 pm
Location: Virtual / Zoom EST
UMD students, faculty, staff, alumni, and friends—join us for the Search Mastery Speaker Series! (Registration is required.)
Description:
This talk will overview issues connecting search engines and the news industry. We will cover how the interaction between search algorithms, news publishers, and news-seeking users can reinforce old tensions and create new ones regarding bias, the health of sociopolitical debate, the financial viability of news, and the role of big tech in the public square. Specific questions about the present and the future will be raised: How does the public look for—and find—news content on search engines? How can essential news organizations with low SEO capacity (such as local news) survive and thrive in the digital environment? How will the replacement of referrals by AI summaries impact news organizations that rely on web traffic for funding and the users who rely on journalism brands to ensure they are getting quality information? This overview aims to explain how the field of Journalism Studies looks at search engines and hopefully raise issues that inspire interdisciplinary collaboration.
Bio:
Dr. Daniel Trielli joined the Philip Merrill College of Journalism’s faculty in Fall 2023 as assistant professor of media and democracy.
Trielli, who earned his master’s degree at Merrill College in 2016, was previously an assistant professor of journalism at Loyola University Chicago since 2022. That year, he completed his Ph.D. at Northwestern University. He researches the impact of algorithmic curation on journalism and political information, and studies how Google affects the news and the audiences that use it to search. He is interested in data and computational journalism, media literacy and algorithmic accountability.
Trielli came to Merrill College as a master’s student in 2015 after a 10-year career as a journalist in Brazil at the national newspaper, O Estado de S. Paulo, and the regional newspaper, Diário do Grande ABC. While at Merrill, he was a graduate assistant and reported for Capital News Service. He led the CNS data team that helped win a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award in 2018 for “Home Sick,” a report on income disparities and their effect on asthma rates in Baltimore.
Trielli’s research has been published in Information, Communication & Society and the journal of the International Symposium on Online Journalism, and was presented at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, and the Computation + Journalism Symposium. He also occasionally writes about it in public-facing media both in the United States and Brazil.
Additional Information:
Please contact infoevents@umd.edu at least one week prior to the event to request disability accommodations. In all situations, a good faith effort (up until the time of the event) will be made to provide accommodations.
Speaker(s): Daniel Trielli