James Hamilton

James T. Hamilton is the Hearst Professor of Communication, Chair of the Department of Communication, and Director of the Stanford Journalism Program. His books on media markets and information provision include All the News That’s Fit to Sell: How the Market Transforms Information into News (Princeton, 2004), Regulation Through Revelation: The Origin, Politics, and Impacts of the Toxics Release Inventory Program (Cambridge, 2005), and Channeling Violence: The Economic Market for Violent Television Programming (Princeton, 1998). His most recent book, Democracy's Detectives: The Economics of Investigative Journalism (Harvard, 2016), focuses on the market for investigative reporting. Through research in the field of computational journalism, he is also exploring how the costs of story discovery can be lowered through better use of data and algorithms. He is co-founder of the Stanford Computational Journalism Lab, Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, affiliated faculty at the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, and member of the JSK Fellowships Board of Visitors.

For his accomplishments in research, he has won awards such as the David N Kershaw Award of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management, the Goldsmith Book Prize from the Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center (twice), the Frank Luther Mott Research Award (twice), the Tankard Book Award, and a Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences Fellowship. Teaching awards from Harvard, Duke, and Stanford include the Allyn Young Prize for Excellence in Teaching the Principles of Economics, Trinity College Distinguished Teaching Award, Bass Society of Fellows, Susan Tifft Undergraduate Teaching and Mentoring Award, and School of Humanities and Sciences Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching.

Prior to joining the Stanford faculty, Hamilton taught at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy, where he directed the De Witt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy. He earned a BA in Economics and Government (summa cum laude) and PhD in Economics from Harvard University.