Joshua Darr

Joshua P. Darr is an Associate Professor at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, where he directs the Local NExT Lab and serves as a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Democracy, Journalism & Citizenship. Darr uses observational and experimental methods to study how local journalism shapes political polarization and American democracy.

Darr’s research on the decline of local news and its relationship to political polarization has informed how newsrooms, funders, and scholars think about the civic role of local journalism. The Local NExT Lab puts that research into action by translating scholarship for newsrooms and policymakers through the Local News Research Hub, and working directly with newsrooms to test their strategies through randomized experiments. He is also currently completing a book with Sue Robinson titled The Politics of Local Journalism: Building Democracy through News Practice, under contract with Oxford University Press.

Darr earned his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Pennsylvania and his B.A. from Boston College. Before joining Syracuse, he was an associate professor of political communication at Louisiana State University’s Manship School. He is a 2022 Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and his work has been supported by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Knight Foundation. He has published widely in journals including Journal of Communication, American Journal of Political Science, and Political Communication, and is coauthor of two books with Cambridge University Press: Home Style Opinion: How Local Newspapers Can Slow Polarization (2021) and Storefront Campaigning (2024).