Meredith D. Clark, Ph.D. (she/her/hers) is an associate professor of race and political communication in the School of Journalism & Media at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a co-PI in the Center for Information and Technology & Public Life at UNC-CH. Dr. Clark’s research on race, media, and power has included everything from online community building and online activism to how news media cover Black people and communities.
Her book, We Tried to Tell Y’all: Black Twitter and Digital Counternarratives, was published in January 2025 by Oxford University Press, and was quickly named one of The New York Times’s “Top 5 Recommended Reads.” Dr. Clark’s research has been published in New Media & Society, Communication & the Public, the International Symposium of Online Journalism, Communication, Culture, and Critique, and Social Movement Studies. She also co-edited “Interrogating Digital Blackness,” a special issue of Social Media + Society.
She was an expert source featured in the Hulu docuseries, "Black Twitter: A People's History,” and the MSNBC documentary, “Canceled.” In 2015, she was named to The Root 100 as one of the most influential African Americans in the country. A self-described “recovering journalist,” she has worked as a copy editor, reporter, columnist, and editorial board member at the Capitol Outlook (Fla.), the Tallahassee Democrat, and the Raleigh News & Observer. She currently serves as board president for two Black news outlets: the Bay State Banner (Boston) and AFROLA (Los Angeles). She has written for and been quoted in outlets including TheGrio.com, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Times, MSNBC’s the Ali Velshi Show, and appeared on multiple panels at SXSW.
She led the redesign of the News Leaders Association’s (formerly American Society of News Editors’) annual newsroom diversity survey between 2017 until 2021. Dr. Clark was a Faculty Fellow with Data & Society in 2020-21 and a Rebooting Social Media Fellow at the Berkman Klein Institute at Harvard University in 2023-24. She has served as a past chair of the Commission of the Status of Women in the Association of Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), and as vice chair (2021-2023) and chair (2023-2025) of the organization’s Council of Divisions.
