Academic biography

Dawn Wheatley is an Assistant Professor in the School of Communications focusing on journalism studies. She received her PhD in 2018 for her research into online news production and coverage of the Irish healthcare sector, with a particular emphasis on sources and voices, and how newsroom sourcing practices are established and reproduced. She remains particularly interested in how different groups, and women in particular, are represented in the news. 

Dawn worked as a production journalist for the Irish Daily Mail and the Irish Times before turning to research and teaching in DCU. She has been chairperson of the BA Journalism programme since 2021, where she teaches both practical and theoretical subjects such as Data Journalism, Representations in the News, and Understanding Digital News. Her research has been published in New Media & Society, Digital Journalism, Journalism Practice, Information, Communication & Society, and on RTÉ's Brainstorm.

Dawn is also involved in various international projects, working on the Irish contribution to the international Worlds of Journalism study which surveys journalists, and co-ordinating the Irish data for the Global Media Monitoring Project which analyses the role of women in the news. She has also been an author of the Digital News Report (Ireland) since 2021.