Caitlin Petre is an associate professor of communication at USC Annenberg, where she studies how data analytics and algorithms shape media industries and creative labor — and vice versa. Using primarily qualitative methods, Petre’s work investigates whether emerging technologies disrupt or cement preexisting distributions of power and resources within media industries, who is included in the creation and implementation of novel technological tools (and who gets left out), how professional norms emerge around workplace technologies, and how emerging digital tools reconfigure working conditions in media industries.

Petre’s research has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. Her book, All the News That’s Fit to Click (2021, Princeton University Press), offers an ethnographic look at how web analytics transformed the work of journalism. She has published peer-reviewed articles in Social Media & Society, the International Journal of Communication, the American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Digital Journalism and other top journals. She has been featured or quoted in popular publications such as the New York Times, the Guardian, the American Prospect, WIRED and the Atlantic.

Petre holds a PhD in Sociology from New York University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. Prior to joining USC Annenberg in 2026, Petre was a faculty member in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University.

Awards and Honors: 

• Warren I. Susman Award for Excellence in Teaching, Rutgers University (university-wide award), (2025)
• Fellow at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism (2014–2015)