Asst. Prof. Mag. Thomas R. Schmidt, MA PhD

Tenure-Track Professor for Media and Communication History 

Research Interests

• Comparative Cultural History ⎜History of Communication Research ⎜Historiography ⎜Media Theory ⎜

Thomas R. Schmidt is a Tenure-Track Professor for Media and Communication History at the University of Vienna’s Department of Communication. Before that, he spent seven years at the University of California, San Diego where his most recent position was Associate Professor of Critical Journalism Studies at the Department of Communication. Originally from Austria, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Oregon (USA). After a postdoc-position at the University of Oregon’s Portland Center, he also taught at Boise State University in Idaho (USA). 

As a cultural historian Schmidt explores the changing form of news in its social, cultural, technological, economic and political dimensions. His major contribution to the field of media history was the monograph “Rewriting the Newspaper: The Storytelling Movement in American Newspapers” (2017) an institutionally situated history of how narrative journalism evolved in the United States during the second half of the twentieth century. 

In his current research Schmidt focuses on comparative cultural history and examines how economic exigencies, technological affordances, political priorities and social change have shaped the emergence and expansion of digital journalism, both in the German-speaking countries and in the United States. Rather than taking the current state of journalism for granted, his research challenges the notion that historical change is uniform, unilinear and predetermined. In addition, Schmidt also analyzes how cultural variation of journalistic practices, norms, and infrastructures evolve over time. Using post-World War II Austria as a case study, he investigates how American journalistic norms, routines and practices expanded during the Cold War. 

Prior to his academic career in the U.S., Schmidt worked for a variety of Austrian news organizations (e.g. ORF – Zeit im Bild, Kleine Zeitung, Datum).