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Dr Glenda Cooper

Dr Glenda Cooper

Senior Lecturer

School of Arts and Social Sciences Department of Journalism

Contact details

Address

Dr Glenda Cooper City, University of London
Northampton Square
London EC1V 0HB
United Kingdom

About

Overview

Dr Glenda Cooper is a senior lecturer at City, University of London, who began her academic career specialising in coverage of humanitarian crises and the use of user-generated content. This resulted in her monograph 'Reporting Humanitarian Crises in a Social Media Age' (Routledge, 2018), the edited collection 'Humanitarianism, Communication and Change' (Peter Lang, 2015) with Prof Simon Cottle as well as a project into UK media coverage of refugees post the 2015 crisis with her colleagues Dr Lindsey Blumell and Dr Mel Bunce. She is currently working on a book with Prof Suzanne Franks about turning points in humanitarian coverage, due out 2021.

Dr Cooper is also currently co-investigator on the DMINR project funded by the Google Digital News Initiative and which is a collaboration between the journalism department and Human-Computer Interaction Design (HCID) department. The objective of the DMINR project is twofold: first it wants to create a tool for news research and verification based on artificial intelligence to help journalists work with big data and conduct investigations in the digital era. Second, it aims to study the impact of artificial intelligence on newswork and journalists.

In 2020 she was awarded a British Academy Small Research Grant to research the work of Alistair Cooke, having gained the first permission to access both the Cooke family archives and the BBC archives into his work.

Dr Cooper is also interested in the new field of 'live journalism' - the interaction of journalism and theatre and is working on a News On Stage project with Catherine Adams at Nottingham Trent University. In 2018 her play Aid Memoir based on her PhD research was performed at the Pleasance Theatre, Islington and subsequently at the 2018 ESRC Festival of Social Science https://www.city.ac.uk/news/2018/september/aid-memoir-glenda-cooper.

She is the book reviews editor for Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism.


She co-founded and co-presents The Knowhow podcast (https://www.theknowhowpodcast.com/) with Dr Lindsey Blumell, which brings together academics and professional to debate pressing matters of the day. Guests have included Dorothy Byrne of Channel 4, Dan Balz of the Washington Post, the author and journalist Dolly Alderton, and Ric Bailey the BBC's chief political adviser. In 2019 she was awarded a grant from the ESRC Festival of Social Science to produce a live version in which refugee journalists were interviewed.

Before academia, Dr Cooper was a journalist at national level, working as a staffer at the Independent, Daily Mail, Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph and Evening Standard. She was a health reporter for the BBC News Channel and a correspondent for BBC Radio 4's World at One and PM programmes. A former columnist for the Sunday Telegraph, she still freelances.During her journalist career she reported on such stories as the death of Diana, Princess of Wales and spent a month in New York in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks reporting for the Washington Post.

She was the 2001 Laurence Stern Fellow at the Post and also the 2006-7 Guardian Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. In 2016 she defended her PhD thesis 'From our own correspondents? How user-generated content has altered the power dynamics in reporting humanitarian disasters

Qualifications

  1. PhD in Journalism, City, University of London, United Kingdom
  2. MA in Creative Writing, City, University of London, United Kingdom
  3. BA (Hons) English Language and Literature, St Hilda's College, University of Oxford, United Kingdom
  4. PG Diploma in Newspaper Journalism, City University of London, United Kingdom

Employment

  1. Senior Lecturer in Journalism, City University of London, Mar 2019 – present
  2. Lecturer, City University of London, Sep 2014 – present

Teaching

Modules taught

- Media theory
- Humanitarian communication
- Multimedia journalism
- Print and online projects

Research

Research students

Natricia Duncan

Attendance: Oct 2020 – present

Thesis title: Understanding the impact of travel journalism on tourism in Eastern Caribbean islands

Role: 2nd Supervisor

Mina Tever

Attendance: Oct 2019 – present

Thesis title: Political Communication in Turkey

Role: 2nd Supervisor

Further information: - Reporting humanitarian disasters
- The use of user-generated content in journalism
- Ethics of using social media

Publications

Publications by category

Books (2)

  1. Cooper, G. (2018). Reporting Humanitarian Disasters in a Social Media Age. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-351-05452-2.
  2. Cottle, S. and Cooper, G. (2014). Humanitarianism, Communications and Change. Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften. ISBN 978-1-4331-2526-3.

Chapters (14)

  1. Cooper, G. (2021). SAVE THE CHILDREN UK’S #BLOGLADESH CAMPAIGN AND THE CHANGE IN HUMANITARIAN REPORTING. In Tandoc, E.C., Jenkins, J., Thomas, R. and Westlund, O. (Eds.), Critical Incidents in Journalism: Pivotal Moments Reshaping Journalism around the World (pp. 166–178). New York: Routledge.
  2. Cooper, G. (2019). #AidToo? The 2018 humanitarian scandals in Oxfam GB and save the children UK. The Routledge Companion to Media and Scandal (pp. 342–353). ISBN 978-0-8153-8759-6.
  3. Cooper, G. (2019). Looking Back to Go Forward: The Ethics of Journalism in a Social Media Age. In Abbas, A.E. (Ed.), Next-Generation Ethics: Engineering a Better Society (pp. 411–426). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-108-72737-2.
  4. Cooper, G. (2017). Rights and Responsibilities when using user-generated content to report crisis events. In Tumber, H. and Waisbord, S. (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Media and Human Rights (pp. 257–268). Routledge. ISBN 978-1-317-21512-7.
  5. Cooper, G. (2017). UGC Creators and use of their content by mainstream media. Digital Technology and Journalism: An International Comparative Perspective (pp. 71–90). ISBN 978-3-319-55025-1.
  6. Cooper, G. (2016). Women War Correspondents in 2013. In Ardener, S., Armitage-Woodward, F. and Sciama, L. (Eds.), War and Women Across Continents Autobiographical and Biographical Experiences (pp. 147–159). Oxford: Berghahn Books. ISBN 978-1-78533-013-1.
  7. Franks, S. (2015). From Pictures to Policy. How Does Humanitarian Reporting have an influence? In Cottle, S. and Cooper, G. (Eds.), Humanitarianism Communications and Change (pp. 153–166). Peter Lang. ISBN 978-1-4331-2526-3.
  8. Cooper, G. (2015). Unlocking the gate? How NGOs mediate the voices of the marginalised in a social media context. Media, Margins and Civic Agency (pp. 29–42). ISBN 978-1-137-51263-5.
  9. Cooper, G. (2015). NGOs media and public understanding: 25 Years on an interview with PAddy Coulter former head of media at Oxfam. In Cooper, G. and Cottle, S. (Eds.), Humanitarianism Communications and Change (pp. 79–91). New York: Peter Lang.
  10. Cooper, G. (2015). "Give us your ****ing money" A Critical Appraisal of TV and the Cash Nexus. In Cooper, G. and Cottle, S. (Eds.), Humanitarianism, Communications and Change (pp. 251–265). New York: Peter Lang.
  11. Cooper, G. and Cottle, S. (2015). Humanitarianism Communications and Change: Final Reflections. In Cooper, G. and Cottle, S. (Eds.), Humanitarianism Communications and Change (pp. 251–264). New York: Peter Lang.
  12. Cooper, G. (2015). Unlocking the Gate? How NGOs Mediate the Voices of the Marginalised in a Social Media Context. Media, Margins and Civic Agency (pp. 29–42). ISBN 978-1-349-56629-7.
  13. Cooper, G. (2012). Facing up to the ethical issues surrounding Facebook use. In Keeble, R.L. and Mair, J. (Eds.), The Phone Hacking Scandal: Journalism on Trial (pp. 250–262). Bury St Edmunds: Abramis.
  14. Cooper, (2011). Why were Women Correspondents the Face of Coverage of the Libyan Revolution. In Mair, J. and Keeble, R.L. (Eds.), Mirage in the Desert? Reporting the 'Arab Spring' (pp. 236–244). Abramis. ISBN 978-1-84549-514-5.

Conference papers and proceedings (7)

  1. McKay, D., Makri, S., Gutierrez-Lopez, M., MacFarlane, A., Missaoui, S., Porlezza, C. … Cooper, G. (2020). We are the change that we seek: Information interactions during a change of viewpoint.
  2. Komatsu, T., Lopez, M.G., Makri, S., Porlezza, C., Cooper, G., MacFarlane, A. … Missaoui, S. (2020). AI should embody our values: Investigating journalistic values to inform AI technology design.
  3. Gutierrez-Lopez, M., Missaoui, S., Makri, S., Porlezza, C., Cooper, G. and Macfarlane, A. (2019). Journalists as Design Partners for AI. CHI 2019 4-9 May, Glasgow.
  4. Missaoui, S., Gutierrez-Lopez, M., Macfarlane, A., Makri, S., Porlezza, C. and Cooper, G. (2019). How to Blend Journalistic Expertise with Artificial Intelligence for Research and Verifying News Stories. CHI 2019 4-9 May, Glasgow.
  5. Cooper, G. (2015). “I felt a responsibility to tweet actual news”: How ‘accidental’ journalists see opportunity and risk in the use of their material by mainstream media. Future of Journalism 2015 9-11 September, JOMEC, Cardiff University, Cardiff.
  6. Cooper, G. (2014). Hurricanes and hashtags: How the media and NGOs treat citizens’ voices online in humanitarian emergencies. COSMIC Citizen Involvement Workshop 4 September, Koç University Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations, Istanbul.
  7. Cooper, G. (2013). Heading for a disaster? Ethical and legal questions raised when mainstream media use user-generated content to report humanitarian crises. IAMCR 25-29 June, Dublin.

Journal articles (7)

  1. Blumell, L.E., Bunce, M., Cooper, G. and McDowell, C. (2020). Refugee and Asylum News Coverage in UK Print and Online Media. Journalism Studies, 21(2), pp. 162–179. doi:10.1080/1461670X.2019.1633243.
  2. Cooper, G. (2020). #AidToo: Social Media Spaces and the Transformation of the Reporting of Aid Scandals in 2018. Journalism Practice. doi:10.1080/17512786.2020.1851611.
  3. Cooper, G., Blumell, L. and Bunce, M. (2020). Beyond the ‘refugee crisis’: How the UK news media represent asylum seekers across national boundaries. International Communication Gazette. doi:10.1177/1748048520913230.
  4. Blumell, L.E. and Cooper, G. (2019). Measuring Gender in News Representations of Refugees and Asylum Seekers. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION, 13, pp. 4444–4464.

    [publisher’s website]

  5. Cooper, G. (2019). Why livestreaming symbolises journalism’s current challenges. Journalism, 20(1), pp. 167–172. doi:10.1177/1464884918806753.
  6. Cooper, G. (2018). “Our Relationship? It’s the Odd Mucky Weekend, Not a One Night Stand”: Journalists and aid agencies in the UK, and the current challenges to sourcing in humanitarian disasters. Journalism Practice, 12(8), pp. 954–965. doi:10.1080/17512786.2018.1513813.
  7. Cooper, G. (2015). Hurricanes and hashtags: How the media and NGOs treat citizens’ voices online in humanitarian emergencies. Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture, 6(2), pp. 233–244. doi:10.1386/iscc.6.2.233_1.

Report

  1. Cooper, , Cooper, G., Cottle, S., Doucet, L., Duncan, S., Gormley, B. … Wynne-Jones, R. (2014). The Future of Humanitarian Reporting..

Professional activities

Event/conference

  1. ESRC Festival of Social Science. London, UK (2018). Chair and Organising Committee.
    Paper: Playing with the way we see refugees
    Author: Cooper, Glenda
    Description: This was a performance of a play followed by a Q&A session afterwards with aid workers, actors and theatre management https://www.city.ac.uk/events/2018/november/playing-with-the-way-we-see-refugees