Greg Munno

Greg Munno is a journalist and researcher who focuses on engaging audiences and using data as part of the storytelling process.  

Munno spent 13 years as a reporter and editor at the Syracuse Post-Standard and its online affiliate, Syracuse.com. Among other assignments, he served as the paper’s city hall reporter, its government editor and its first civic engagement editor. In that last role, he co-founded CNY Speaks, a civic engagement initiative that attracted more than 10,000 participants to community forums and online discussions. The project won the 2009 Best Online Content Award from the New York State Associated Press Association. He has won numerous other awards, including a first-place New York State Publisher’s Association Business Reporting Award for an investigation into how slumlords avoid prosecution by hiding behind limited liability corporation laws.

Munno started his own company in 2009 that specializes in audience and stakeholder engagement, working with organizations such as the Jefferson Center for New Democratic Processes, the Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion and the Allyn Foundation.

He earned an Executive Masters of Public Administration from the Maxwell School of Syracuse University in 2010, and in 2011 Munno entered the Newhouse School’s doctoral program in Mass Communications. His research focuses on the factors that spark reader participation (liking, sharing and commenting) with digital news content, as well as the effects of that participation on journalists, on other readers and on the participants themselves.

Scholarly publications include “Triggering Participation: Exploring the effects of third-person and hostile media perceptions on online participation” in Computers in Human Behavior (Chung, M., Munno, G., and Moritz, B., 2015), and “Public deliberation and co-production in the political and electoral arena: A citizens’ jury approach” in the Journal of Public Deliberation (Munno, G., and Nabatchi, T., 2014). 

Munno first joined the Newhouse faculty in 2014 as a research assistant professor with the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a data research center that specializes in using the Freedom of Information Act to obtain, analyze and disseminate federal government records. While at TRAC, Munno wrote numerous reports using TRAC data, including pieces for the IRE Journal and the Knight Foundation’s Media Innovation Blog.

He is a member of IRE (Investigative Reporters and Editors), the Online News Association, the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, the International Communication Association.