Taylor Owen is an associate professor and the Beaverbrook Chair in Media, Ethics and Communications at McGill University’s Max Bell School of Public Policy. He also sat on the Board of Directors of the Centre for International Governance Innovation.
Owen was previously an assistant professor of digital media and global affairs at The University of British Columbia and a senior fellow at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York. Prior to this, he was the research director of Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, where he led a program studying the impact of digital technology on the practice of journalism. He has held research positions at Yale University, the London School of Economics and the Peace Research Institute in Oslo, Norway. His work while in these positions focused on the intersection between information technology and international affairs.
Owen holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford and he was a Trudeau and Banting scholar, an Action Canada and Public Policy Forum fellow, and was named the 2016 Public Policy Forum Emerging Leader.
Owen founded the international affairs media platform OpenCanada.org. He is the author of Disruptive Power: The Crisis of the State in the Digital Age (Oxford University Press, 2015) and co-author of The Platform Press: How Silicon Valley Reengineered Journalism (Tow Center for Digital Journalism, 2017, with Emily Bell). He also co-edited two books: The World Won’t Wait: Why Canada Needs to Rethink its International Policies (University of Toronto Press, 2015, with Roland Paris), and Journalism After Snowden: The Future of the Free Press in the Surveillance State (Columbia University Press, 2017, with Emily Bell).
Owen’s book on Silicon Valley, journalism and democracy will be published by Yale University Press in 2019.