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Photograph of Margot Susca

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Margot Susca Associate Professor SOC | Journalism

Degrees
Ph.D. Mass Communication, Florida State University
M.S. Journalism, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism
B.A. Journalism and Political Science, UMass Amherst

Favorite Spot on Campus
The Woods-Brown Amphitheater
Bio
Margot Susca is a tenured associate professor of journalism, accountability, and democracy. Dr. Susca combines investigative reporting techniques with critical political-economy methods to examine media ownership and its implications for democracy. She is a recognized expert on the growing influence of private equity and hedge funds in the news marketplace.


The University of Illinois Press published her first book, Hedged: How Private Investment Funds Helped Destroy American Newspapers and Undermine Democracy in January 2024. It won the Frank Luther Mott/Kappa Tau Alpha Research Award, which annually honors the best research-based book about journalism or mass communication. Dr. Susca's second book under contract with the University of Massachusetts Press is in peer review. Additionally, her scholarship has been published in peer-reviewed journals including Communication and Democracy; Critical Studies in Media Communication; and Communication, Culture, & Critique.

Dr. Susca's academic and professional newsroom experiences inform her work as a mentor, scholar, and teacher. In 2022, she won American University’s Outstanding Teaching Award given annually to a full-time faculty member in a tenure-line position. She mentors and teaches undergraduate, master's, and doctoral students in the School of Communication and through the Complex Problems program works with first-years from every University major. Since 2016, Dr. Susca regularly has served as an editor at the Investigative Reporting Workshop on campus founded by nonprofit news pioneer Charles Lewis.


Off campus, she has served as a Maynard Institute for Journalism Education fellowship mentor in the Storytelling/Investigative Reporting track, and she has worked as an assessor with Poynter's International Fact Check Network for nearly a decade. Dr. Susca is a frequent guest and expert on news programs and podcasts around the world discussing journalism and society, the business of media, and corporate media ownership. Before earning a doctorate, she worked as a newspaper reporter in Connecticut and Florida.
See Also
Publishers Weekly Review of "Hedged"
‘The Investment Firms Leave Behind a Barren Wasteland’ in POLITICO
Factually! with Adam Conover: How Capitalism Murdered Journalism with Margot Susca
WNYC's On The Media: "Journalism's Private Investment Era"
"The War on Leakers" in The New Republic
For the Media
To request an interview for a news story, call AU Communications at 202-885-5950 or submit a request. Explore all AU Faculty Experts in our media guide.

Teaching

Fall 2025

  • COMM-320 Reporting

  • COMM-409 Journalism Ethics

  • COMM-899 Doctoral Dissertation

Spring 2026

  • COMM-200 Writing for Communication

  • COMM-462 Journalism Capstone

  • COMM-899 Doctoral Dissertation

  • CORE-105 Complex Problems Seminar: Democracy Along the Red Line

Fall 2026

  • COMM-320 Reporting

  • COMM-462 Journalism Capstone

  • COMM-899 Doctoral Dissertation

  • CORE-102 Encounter AU