Matthew Weber

Matthew Weber is Professor of Communication at Rutgers University’s School of Communication and Information, where he also participates in the NetSCI Network Science lab and leads the Active Surveillance of Policy Ecosystems and Networks (ASPEN) Lab. His work is supported by the NSF, William T. Grant Foundation, Democracy Fund, and others.

Education

• Ph.D., Communication – University of Southern California
• M.A., Communication – University of Southern California
• M.S., Journalism and Media Management – Northwestern University
• B.S., Industrial Engineering and Economics – Northwestern University

Weber’s research interrogates how organizations adapt to new information and communication technologies. He combines macro- and micro-level perspectives to study digital disruption in news ecosystems, technology adoption in multinational firms, and the emergence of new organizational forms such as social networking sites. Methodologically, he integrates social-network analysis, archival research, interviews, and large-scale web-archived data to trace organizational processes over time.

His recent articles converge on three themes: (1) algorithmic gatekeeping and code’s role in news distribution, (2) longitudinal network studies of journalism and NGO ecosystems, and (3) theoretical development around organizational speciation and disruptive innovation.

Awards & Honors

• Rutgers Department of Communication Annual Research Award (2014)
• Web Science Top Paper Finalist (2012)
• Redding Dissertation Award, Dissertation of the Year (2012)
• ICA Organizational Communication Division Top Paper (2011)
• Industry Studies Association Dissertation of the Year Finalist (2011)

Weber has served as Principal Investigator or Co-PI on grants totaling over $1.5 million since 2012, including NSF-funded web-archiving infrastructure projects, the Democracy Fund’s study of local news ecosystems, and the William T. Grant Foundation’s examination of policymakers’ use of research evidence. He teaches doctoral seminars in communication theory and research methods, and his labs provide training in computational social science and big-data approaches to organizational communication.

Active research groups: ASPEN Lab, Computational Social Science Lab, NetSci Lab, Social Media & Society Cluster.