Louisa Lincoln

Louisa Lincoln’s research examines sustainable funding models for nonprofit news and public media organizations.

Originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota, Louisa Lincoln is a doctoral candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication. Her research examines sustainable funding models for journalism, with a focus on nonprofit news and public media organizations in the United States. She is also interested in the intersection of media policy and journalism funding — particularly publicly-funded models for local news — and the relationship between nonprofit newsrooms and their philanthropic funders.

Lincoln graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she earned her bachelor’s degree with honors in Journalism and Political Science, and a certificate in Gender and Women’s Studies. In 2017, she was awarded the James L. Baughman Senior Achievement Award from the School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

During her time at UW-Madison, Lincoln got involved in the nonprofit news sector as a public engagement and marketing intern at the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism. She went on to work in the sponsorship department at NPR in Washington, D.C., and in the development department at PRX (formerly Public Radio International) before starting her doctoral studies.

More recently, Lincoln was a 2022 COMPASS Fellow at the American Journalism Project and was a 2021-2022 Lipman Family Prize Fellow. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism.