Professional Profile
Note: this is the summary version. Please click here to view a more detailed biography of Ellen Hume.
Ellen Hume is an Annenberg Fellow in Civic Media at the Center for Media and Communication Studies at Central European University in Budapest. Until June, 2009 she was research director of the Center for Future Civic Media at MIT. She was also the Founding Editor and Publisher of the New England Ethnic Newswire (Jan. 2007-present, and the Founding Director of the Center on Media and Society, UMass Boston (2004).
Hume is an experienced journalist, teacher, speaker, administrator, conference director and television commentator. While living in Prague, Czech Republic, from 1998-2000, she updated her thinking about journalism, the Internet and democracy, originally published in her prizewinning 1995 study, Tabloids, Talk Radio and the Future of News. As the founding Executive Director of PBS's Democracy Project, from 1996 to 1998, she developed special news programs that encouraged citizen involvement in public affairs. She oversaw PBS's 1996 and 1998 election coverage, creating PBS Debate Night, a nationally televised Congressional leadership debate, as well as local candidate debates on PBS stations across the country. She also created "Follow the Money", PBS's weekly television and Web series on the role of money in American politics. At PBS, she developed "resource journalism," a multimedia approach to news coverage.
Hume has more than 30 years of experience as a reporter and analyst for American newspapers, magazines and television. She was a White House and political correspondent for The Wall Street Journal from 1983 to 1988, and a Washington-based national reporter with the Los Angeles Times from 1977 to 1983. Her journalism career also included stints at KTMS Radio, The Detroit Free Press, Santa Barbara News Press and other newspapers.
Hume was a Senior Research Fellow at UMass Boston (2003-2008), creating and teaching, “News Media and Political Power,” “Local and Ethnic News Media,” “Media, History and Identity,” and other courses. 
From
1988 to 1993, Hume served as Executive Director and Senior Fellow at Harvard
University's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy,
designing conferences and teaching graduate seminars on media, politics
and government as an adjunct lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.
Hume joined Northwestern University's Annenberg Washington Program in
1993, teaching Medill journalism students during their Washington semester,
and analyzing how new media technologies are changing journalism and politics.
A television commentator, Hume appeared weekly as a media analyst on CNN's Reliable Sources (1993-1997) and as a frequent panelist on PBS's Washington Week in Review (1979-1988). She co-anchored PBS's live coverage of the congressional hearings on Waco in 1995, and from 1990 to1992 she moderated "The Editors" talk show on Canadian public television. The recipient of numerous honors and fellowships, Hume has conducted journalism and democracy workshops throughout the United States, in Ethiopia, Russia, Bosnia, Poland and the Czech Republic. She currently is at work on two long-range writing projects in Boston, Massachusetts, where she lives with her husband and four children.