Michael Schudson is a professor of communications in the M.A. and Ph.D. degree programs at Columbia Journalism School.

Schudson is co-author of "The Reconstruction of American Journalism," a report which received significant publicity when it was published in 2009. He is the author of many books and articles on the history and sociology of U.S. journalism, American popular culture, media and politics, cultural memory, and the history of U.S. ideas of what makes a good citizen. His latest book, Why Democracies Need An Unloveable Press, was published in 2008 by Polity Press. He has also written Discovering The News: A Social History Of American Newspapers (1978), The Power Of News (1995), The Good Citizen (1998) and The Sociology Of News (2003).

Schudson received a B.A. from Swarthmore College, and a Ph.D. (in sociology) from Harvard. He has been the recipient of several prestigious fellowships, including the Guggenheim Fellowship and the MacArthur Fellowship.