Dr. Christopher Ali is an Associate Professor in the University of Virginia Department of Media Studies. He joined the Department in the fall of 2013 after completing his PhD at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests include: communication policy and regulation, critical political economy, critical geography, comparative media systems, localism and local news.

Christopher’s first book, Media Localism: The Policies of Place (University of Illinois Press, 2017) addresses the difficulties of defining and regulating local media in the 21st century in the United States, United Kingdom and Canada and the implications these difficulties have for the long-term viability of local news.

Currently, Christopher is the Faculty Fellow at the Benton Foundation. In 2016-2017, Christopher was a Fellow with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, where he completed an intensive research project on the state of small market newspapers in the United States titled, “Local News in a Digital World: Small Market Newspapers in an era of Digital Disruption.”