Mohammad Yousuf

Assistant Professor

Photo: Mohammad Yousuf
Email: 
myousuf@unm.edu
Phone: 
505-277-5305
Office: 
Room 221
Personal Website
 

Ph.D., University of Oklahoma, 2016

Profile

Dr. Mohammad Yousuf, the recipient of the 2022 SWECJMC Educator Award and many other teaching and research awards, embodies the combination of experience, expertise, innovativeness, and dedication that a journalism and communication scholar needs in the age of datafication and big data analytics. Through his collaborations with scholars from other disciplines such as computer science, Dr. Yousuf is leading mass communication and journalism scholarships in a new direction by utilizing the advances in computation, artificial intelligence and automated text analysis technologies. He has been working hard for years to incorporate data, programming, and computation into mass communication and journalism curricula. He is also committed to serving communities beyond the university.

Research

Dr. Yousuf studies journalistic practices that safeguard the quality of news as well as the financial independence of news organizations while fulfilling the needs of the 21st century audience. He also studies malpractices such as creation and dissemination of misinformation that threaten not only the quality of news, but also news organizations producing quality content. He has embraced an interdisciplinary and multimethod approach in his research and collaborated with many scholars from various disciplines including computer science and business. In addition to publications in top journals in his field such as the Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, the Journalism Practice, and the Journal of Media Ethics, his works also got presented and published in many computer science and interdisciplinary platforms including the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (CSCW), the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM), the World Wide Web Conference, the Computation+Journalism Symposium, and the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. He received seven top paper awards from several conferences.

Selected Publications

Haque, M. M., Yousuf, M., Alam, A. S., Saha, P., Ahmed, S. I., & Hassan, N. (2020). Combating Misinformation in Bangladesh: Roles and Responsibilities as Perceived by Journalists, Fact-checkers, and Users. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 4(CSCW2), 1-32. doi: 10.1145/3415201. Link to article: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3415201

Chowdhury, F. A., Allen, L., Yousuf, M., & Mueen, A. (2020). On Twitter Purge: A retrospective analysis of suspended users. Companion Proceedings of the Web Conference 2020 (pp. 371-378). doi: 10.1145/3366424.3383298. Link to article: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3366424.3383298

Yousuf, M., Haque, M. M., & Islam, M. K. (2019). Online niche of English newspapers in Bangladesh: Analyzing news stories and user engagement on Facebook. Newspaper Research Journal, 40(1), 106-126.

Hassan, N., Yousuf, M., Mahfuzul Haque, M., A Suarez Rivas, J., & Khadimul Islam, M. (2019). Examining the roles of automation, crowds and professionals towards sustainable fact-checking. Companion Proceedings of the 2019 World Wide Web Conference (pp. 1001-1006). ACM.

Craig, D. A., & Yousuf, M. (2018). Teaching and assessing learning about virtue: Insights and challenges from a redesigned journalism ethics class. Journal of Media Ethics, 33(4), 181-197.

Yousuf, M., & Craig, D. A. (2018). Service learning plus social learning: preparing future journalists through a collaborative project. Southwestern Mass Communication Journal, 33(2). Available at http://swecjmc.wp.txstate.edu/files/2018/04/YousufCraig.pdf

Rony, M. M. U., Hassan, N., & Yousuf, M. (2017). Diving deep into clickbaits: Who use them to what extents in which topics with what effects? Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances In Social Networks Analysis And Mining 2017 (pp. 232-239). https://doi.org/10.1145/3110025.3110054

Yousuf, M., & Taylor, M. (2017). Helping Syrians tell their story to the world. Journalism Practice, 11(2-3), 302-318. https://tinyurl.com/ldt8nxh

Craig, D., Ketterrer, S., & Yousuf, M. (2017). To post or not to post: Online discussion of gun permit mapping and the development of ethical standards in data journalism. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 94(1), 168-188. https://tinyurl.com/k78at6v

Teaching

In efforts to incorporate data and computation into mass communication and journalism curricula, Dr. Yousuf developed and revised multiple related courses from scratches. He teaches Computational Text Analysis (CJ 502) and Data Tools for Media Professionals (CJ 350)– two courses he developed – in addition to courses relating to journalism and digital media. He previously taught web design and programming. He also teaches research methods courses at both graduate and undergraduate levels. Dr. Yousuf’s teaching contributions are not limited to undergraduate and graduate students. In summer 2022, he taught a pre-conference workshop on computational text mining at the 105th Annual Conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) in Detroit, Michigan. Twenty professors and graduate students from universities in several countries including Singapore and the United Arab Emirates participated in the workshop.

Service

Dr. Yousuf is strongly committed to helping his students succeed beyond classrooms and to serving communities. In addition to serving on thesis/dissertation committees and supervising independent studies, Dr. Yousuf hired multiple undergraduate research assistants from his department and other departments (e.g., Political Science) to work on his grant-funded research projects. On several occasions, he managed funds from universities to take undergraduate students to conferences such as Computation+Journalism symposium and IRE (Investigative Reporters & Editors) conference. He also serves as the faculty advisor of several chartered student organizations at UNM.

Dr. Yousuf has been serving as an editorial board member for the Newspaper Research Journal, a major academic journal dedicated to publishing research about legacy news organizations. He is serving as research co-chair of the Media Management, Economics and Entrepreneurship Division, AEJMC.

In addition to various services that Dr. Yousuf provides to his work-related communities, he is also committed to serving communities outside of the university. Particularly, he is passionate about efforts to preserve local news. He believes that continuous decay in local news contributes to rising misinformation and eroding democratic principles. He has been serving as an advisory panel member of the New Mexico Local News Fund (NMLNF), an organization that seeks to “grow the ecosystem of local news across our state to better serve the information needs of all New Mexicans.” He also serves as a volunteer newsletter consultant for the Non-profit Sector News, a small non-profit news organization based in Pennsylvania.