Michael Reiss has been a postdoc researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Media Research | Hans-Bredow-Institut (HBI) since November 2023. His research interests include political communication, especially news consumption and opinion formation in the context of emerging media such as generative AI as well as methods of computational social science. For the latter, he is in particular interested in the potential use and role of large language models as a research tool.
He is part of Research Program 1 “Transformation of Public Communication – Journalistic and Intermediary Functions in the Process of Opinion Formation” and is leading the research project “Generative Artificial Intelligence for Information Navigation“, examining the extent and purposes of generative AI use in the context of political information, including its associated societal opportunities and risks. Results can be found here.
In the winter semester of 2025/26, Michael Reiss will be working as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Communication Science and Media Research (IfKW) at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.
His cumulative dissertation project at the Department of Communication and Media Research at the University of Zurich focused on patterns of news use and news non-use. His dissertation relied on computational methods, such as the use of online tracking data and data donations (Reiss, Michael (2023). News Must Die for News to Live – Empirical, Methodological, Conceptual, and Theoretical Perspectives on Contemporary News consumption and a Proposal for a Normative Turn. University of Zurich, Philosophische Fakultät, https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-238678).
Michael Reiss studied Sociology as well as Economics in the Bachelor’s program at Heidelberg University. In the Master’s program he studied both Socio-Ecological Economics and Policy at the Vienna University of Economics and Social Research Methods at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
