Prof. Dr. Ike Picone

Ike Picone is Associate Professor and head of the Department of Communication Sciences at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). He heads the News: Uses, Strategies & Engagements research unit of research group imec-SMIT, VUB (Studies on Media, Innovation and Technology) and directs the Flemish Knowledge Centre on Media Research. He is part of the international team working on the annual Digital News Report of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. He lectures on the relationship between journalism, technology, democracy and media use. He is a member of the Journalism Council and the Scientific Advisory Board of the Hannah Arendt Institute.

His research is situated at the crossroads of Journalism Studies and Audience Research. The common thread within his research is the study of evolutions in news use. More concretely, he is interested in how news users constitute different news repertoires, and how these news repertoires are socially constructed. He combines this with the study of specific participatory practices, conceptualised as small acts of engagements. He mostly takes an ethnographic approach to news use, exploring also new methodological pathways to news uses such as data donations and user tracking, while looking at quantitative surveys such as the Digital News Report. 

He is managing various projects, most notably the Flemish Knowledge Centre on Media Research. Next to that, he is involved in two Horizon Europe projects, TITAN, on Generative AI for Critical Thinking, and REMED, on making resilient media in democratic societies. He is also supervising various PhD projects in the field of media/news use and innovation.