Benjamin Toff

Benjamin Toff is a visiting principal researcher at Pew Research Center. In this role, he works closely with others on staff designing ways to better understand how people access, engage with, and think about news and information in today’s media environment. This work mostly involves coming up with questions to ask in surveys and focus groups, analyzing data to make sense of patterns, and writing about what we find in reports and other articles.

He also contributes to projects by offering his expertise on related academic research. Ben is at the Center while on temporary leave from his role as an associate professor in the journalism school at the University of Minnesota, where he studies and teaches courses on media, politics and public opinion. He has published one book, “Avoiding the News: Reluctant Audiences for Journalism,” and he is currently working on a second, focused on trust in news. He previously studied and wrote about similar topics as a senior research fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, where he also managed a team of researchers.

Ben earned a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in political science and graduated from Harvard with an undergraduate degree in social studies. In between, he worked as a researcher and journalist at The New York Times.