Office hours: by appointment

Mary Lynn Young, PhD, is a full professor, co-founder and board member of The Conversation Canada, a national non-profit journalism organization, and affiliate of The Conversation global network. She has held a number of academic administrative positions at UBC, including Associate Dean, Faculty of Arts (2011-2016), Director of the UBC School of Journalism (2008-2011), and Acting Director (June-December 2007).

Her research interests include gender and the media, newsroom sociology, data and computational journalism, journalism startups and representations of crime. She has written two separate co-authored books, Reckoning: Journalism’s Limits and Possibilities (Oxford, 2020) with Candis Callison, and Data Journalism and the Regeneration of News (Routledge, 2019) with Alfred Hermida.

She has worked as a journalist in a variety of roles (reporter, copy/slot editor, national business columnist) with major daily news organizations in Canada and the United States. She was certified as a professional coach in 2013. She has been recognized for her overall contributions, most recently with the 2016 University College Alumni of Influence Award at the University of Toronto. Prior to that she was nominated for the 2013 YWCA Women of Distinction Award in the Education, Training and Development category, and named one of BC’s 100 Women of Influence by the Vancouver Sun in 2010.

Her list of scholarly awards includes: Visiting Fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ), Oxford University (April-June 2016), the UBC Peter Wall Institute of Advanced Studies Early Career Scholar Award (2009-2010) and the 2007 Rufus Z. Smith Award for the best article published in the American Review of Canadian Studies. The article, Cross-Border Crime Stories: American Media, Canadian Law, and Murder in the Internet Age, was co-authored with David Pritchard, University of Wisconsin (Milwaukee). Her teaching awards include: a 2003 teaching award from UBC’s Alma Mater Society and a Freedom Forum teaching fellowship for journalism educators at the University of Indiana in 2000.

Mary Lynn was an expert witness in the Cornwall Public Inquiry, producing a comprehensive media analysis about allegations of historical abuse over a 20-year period involving youth in that community.

In 2007, she launched the Feminist Media Project in partnership with other feminist academics. The project included a website that provided a feminist perspective on media depictions of missing and murdered women. As part of this work, she was a member of the Board of Directors (2006-2009) at the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre in Vancouver.

Mary Lynn holds a PhD in Criminology from the University of Toronto.

Dr. Young’s current research projects include the impact of data journalism on news norms, practices and organizational routines, and does gender matter in a journalism startup.

Recent Work

Hermida, Alfred, and Mary Lynn Young. Forthcoming. Data Journalism and the Regeneration of News. New York: Routledge.

Young, Mary Lynn. Forthcoming. “Crime Coverage.” In ICA International Encyclopedia of Journalism Studies. Wiley-Blackwell.

Young, Mary Lynn, and Candis Callison. 2017. “When gender, colonialism and technology matter in a journalism startup.” Journalism: 1-35, published online first December 20.

Young, Mary Lynn, Alfred Hermida, and Johanna Fulda. 2017. “What makes for great data journalism? A content analysis of data journalism awards finalists, 2012-2015.”Journalism Practice: 1-21.

Hermida, Alfred, and Young, Mary Lynn. 2016. “Finding the Data Unicorn: A hierarchy of hybridity in data and computational journalism.” Digital Journalism, Online First April 7: 1-18.

Young, Mary Lynn. 2016. “Scoop was King: Media Competition, Crime News, and Masculinity.” In Covering Canadian Crime: What Journalists Should Know and the Public Should Question, edited by C. Richardson and R. Smith Fullerton, 217-244. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Young, Mary Lynn, and Janet Giltrow. 2015. “A mobile responsive expertise: Thinking more productively and generatively about journalism education.” In Toward 2020: New Directions in Journalism Education (online conference proceedings), edited by Gene Allen, Stephanie Craft, Christopher Waddell and Mary Lynn Young, 46-63. Toronto: Ryerson Journalism Research Centre.

Young, Mary Lynn and Alfred Hermida. 2014. “From Mr. and Mrs. Outlier to Central Tendencies: Computational Journalism and Crime Reporting at the Los Angeles Times.” Digital Journalism, 1-17. DOI: 10.1080/21670811.2014.976409. (First published online 21 November 2014).

Young, Mary Lynn, and Alison Beale. 2013. “Canada: A Step Forward? The Paradox of Women in News.” in The Palgrave International Handbook on Women and Journalism, edited by C. Byerly, 109-121. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Haines-Saah, Rebecca, Joy L. Johnson, Robin Repta, Aleck Ostry, Mary Lynn Young, Rick Sawatzky, Jean Shoveller, Lorraine Greaves, and Pam A. Ratner. 2013. “The privileged normalization of marijuana use: An analysis of Canadian newspaper reporting.” Critical Public Health, 24 (1): 47-61.

Fletcher, Fred, and Mary Lynn Young. 2012. “Political Communication in a Changing Media Environment.” In The Sage Handbook of Political Communication, edited by H. Semetko and M. Scamell, 36-48. London: Sage Publications Ltd.

Voth, James, Rick Sawatzky, Pam Ratner, Mary Lynn Young, Robin Repta, Rebecca Haines-Saah, and Joy Johnson. 2012. “A computer-assisted approach to filtering large numbers of documents for media analyses.” International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 16 (1): 13-30.

Young, Mary Lynn. 2009. “Media Coverage of Youth Abuse in Cornwall, Ont.” in Report of the Cornwall Public Inquiry. The Honourable G. Normand Glaude, Commissioner.

Ostry, Aleck, and Mary Lynn Young and Merrilee Hughes. 2007. “The Quality of Nutritional Information Available on Popular Websites: A Content Analysis.” Health Education Research, 23 (4): 648-655.

Young, Mary Lynn, and David Pritchard. 2006. “Cross-Border Crime Stories: American Media, Canadian Law and Murder in the Internet Age.” American Review of Canadian Studies, 36 (3): 407-426.

Jiwani, Yasmin, and Mary Lynn Young. 2006. “Missing and Murdered Women: Reproducing Marginality in News Discourse.” Canadian Journal of Communication Special Issue on Sexualities, 31 (4): 1-38.

Sparks, Robert, Mary Lynn Young and Simon Darnell. 2006. “Convergence, Corporate Restructuring, and Canadian Online News, 2000-2003.” Canadian Journal of Communication, 31 (2): 391-423.