Elizabeth Hansen is academic lead for the business models for news program at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy at the Kennedy School.
The business models program seeks to strengthen news ecosystems by combining high-quality research with sharing best practices that increase the knowledge and capacity of news organizations to find financial sustainability and fulfill their civic missions in a changing digital media environment. Elizabeth directs the program’s primary project studying how small, single-topic newsrooms can cultivate and grow their digital audience. Her academic work focuses on the organizational and institutional dynamics of navigating digital change in journalism. She has written about the changing relationship between news publishers and social platforms; and strategies for combining audience engagement and revenue generation in digital news. She is a PhD candidate in Organizational Behavior at Harvard Business School and an affiliate of the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society. From 2016 - 2018, she was a Senior Research Fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School.