Journalist and Media Analyst, International Media Development Advisers
Ellen Hume is a veteran journalist, teacher, and media analyst who recently returned to Boston after seven
years in Budapest, Hungary. Hume has been an international media consultant for the Knight and
Adessium foundations, USAID and Internews. She is an advisory board member at Direkt 36, a Hungarian
investigative journalism news collaborative, and at the Center for International Media Assistance.
Previously, Hume was the Research Director at the Center for Future Civic Media at the MIT Media Lab.
She founded the Center on Media and Society at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where she
published an online summary of New England’s ethnic news media, the New England Ethnic Newswire.
Previously, she served for five years as executive director at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on
the Press, Politics, and Public Policy. She also was executive director of PBS’s Democracy Project, where
she developed news programs for American public television that encouraged citizen involvement in public
affairs. Hume was White House and political correspondent for the Wall Street Journal; local and national
reporter for the Los Angeles Times, and a regular commentator on PBS’s Washington Week in Review and
CNN’s Reliable Sources programs.