Dani Madrid-Morales Lecturer in Journalism and Global Communication, The University of Sheffield

I'm a scholar of global media and communication with a background in broadcast journalism and East Asian studies currently working as Lecturer in Journalism and Global Communication at the School of Information, Journalism and Communication, The University of Sheffield. Previously, I was an Assistant Professor at the University of Houston and a PhD Fellow at City University of Hong Kong. Before entering academia, I worked for a decade as scriptwriter and news editor at Televisió de Catalunya, and I taught at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) and Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC).

I study global political communication with an emphasis on State-sponsored news, disinformation and foreign public opinion. My work often crosses over disciplines including media and area studies, international politics, digital humanities and computational social sciences. Geographically, I focus on communication processes in East Asia, where I lived for several years, and Sub-Saharan Africa, which is at the centre of my current research program. I work with a broad mix of qualitative and quantitative methods: from in-depth interviews to online experiments, and from computational text analysis through to long-form newsroom ethnography.

Most recent updates:

16 Jun, 2026: The International Panel on the Information Environment (IPIE) published a new technical paper I co-authored: "Resilience and Vulnerability to Misinformation and Disinformation in Political Information Environments: A Comparative Review of Ten Indexes". The report is open access and free to download.
6 Jun, 2026: At the 76th annual conference of the International Communication Association (ICA) in Cape Town, I presented a paper co-authored with colleagues at Sheffield: "Russo-Chinese Narrative Alignment in International Broadcasting: The Case of Russia's Invasion of Ukraine".
3 Jun, 2026: Co-organised the ICA preconference "African and Global Media Representations of Africa" in Cape Town, where I also presented: "Disrupting or Conforming: Comparing African and non-African News Coverage of African Countries on YouTube".
17 Apr, 2026: Published a new paper from the project "Electoral Disinformation in Sub-Saharan Africa": "How civil society coalition-building affects information integrity during elections: evidence from four African countries". The paper is open access and free to download.
14 Apr, 2026: Took part in the Research Showcase organised by the University of Sheffield's Faculty of Social Sciences, where I presented a poster bringing together four recent co-authored projects on disinformation in Sub-Saharan Africa.
12 Apr, 2026: Just returned from a week-long visit to Jinan (China), where I participated in a series of events organised by the School of Journalism and Communication at Shandong Normal University. I delivered an open lecture on "Global News on YouTube: Platform Logics and the Restructuring of Media Flows".
27 Mar, 2026: The UK Parliament published its report on "Disinformation diplomacy: How malign actors are seeking to undermine democracy", which includes several recommendations I made during my oral evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee.
10 Mar, 2026: Launched Newsroomsim.org, a research-informed, LLM-powered simulator for journalism educators and students. The tool focuses on teaching editorial decision-making in an international context and is currently available for early access — get in touch if you are interested in using it.
2 Mar, 2026: Bloomberg published "China Spent Big on an African Media Empire, But No One's Watching", drawing on data from my co-authored article "How Effective are Chinese Media in Shaping Audiences' Attitudes Towards China?" (Online Media and Global Communication, 2022).
30 Jan, 2026: Wrote an opinion piece for The Independent on how UK aid budget cuts are benefiting countries like China in the competition for soft power: "How UK aid cuts help China win the battle for hearts and minds in Africa".

All updates >>