Professor Xinzhi ZHANG 張昕之

Dr. Zhang's research focuses on digital journalism, political communication, AI policy and regulation, public health campaigns, and computational social science. His research examines citizens’ digitally mediated communication about public issues; and how digital technologies—especially Generative AI and social media—change news production and dissemination. His research aims to empower citizens by promoting deliberative conversations and helping government agencies, news organizations, technology companies, and start-ups design communication campaigns and policies, facilitating evidence-based interventions to reduce bias, inequality, and miscommunication. His work has appeared in top-tier journals such as Human Communication Research, Journal of Communication, Social Media + Society, Digital Journalism, Health Communication, and Social Science Computer Review. He was awarded two competitive research grants under the General Research Fund (GRF) from the Research Grants Council (RGC) of the Hong Kong SAR. He has won the Best Paper Awards at the conferences of the International Communication Association (ICA) and the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC).

Before joining CityU, Dr. Zhang was an Associate Professor with tenure in the Department of Journalism and the Department of Interactive Media in the School of Communication at Hong Kong Baptist University, where he was the founding Programme Director of the Master of Science (MSc) in AI and Digital Media, the first postgraduate programme in Hong Kong focusing on AI and its applications in digital media, human communication, and innovation for entrepreneurship. During his directorship, the programme was selected for sponsorship under the University Grants Committee’s (UGC) Targeted Taught Postgraduate Programmes Fellowships Scheme. He is the recipient of Hong Kong Baptist University’s Young Researcher Award (2021) and Teaching Award (2022). He has been a visiting scholar at the Department of Communication of the University of California at Davis in the US in 2022.

Dr. Zhang is the Editorial Board Member of Human Communication Research (one of the flagship journals of the ICA), Digital Journalism, and Chinese Journal of Communication.

• Media and Communication in the Chinese Contexts
• AI Law, Ethics, and Regulation
• Human-AI Communication Workshop
  
• Digital Innovation and Entrepreneurship

• 2021 – 2022. Principal Investigator (PI), Public Policy Research Funding Scheme (PPR) from the Policy Innovation and Co-ordination Office (PICO) of the Government of the Hong Kong SAR, Hong Kong Media’s Coverage of Political Polarization and its Effects on People’s Political Attitudes and Behaviors. [356,972 HKD]. Completed.
• 2020 - 2023. Co-Investigator (Co-I). The Interdisciplinary Research Clusters Matching Scheme (IRCMS) by the University Research Clusters, Hong Kong Baptist University. Engaging the Audience with AI-powered News Chatbots: Developing and Evaluating a Critiquing-oriented Conversational Recommender System for Digital News. [937,500 HKD]. Completed.
• 2020 – 2022. Principal Investigator (PI), General Research Fund (GRF), the Research Grants Council (RGC), Hong Kong SAR. Why Fact-Checking Fails? Factors Influencing the Effectiveness of Corrective Messages Countering Misinformation on Social Media: A Comparison of Hong Kong, the United States, and the Netherlands. [408,256 HKD]. Completed.
• 2019 – 2021. Principal Investigator (PI). General Research Fund (GRF), the Research Grants Council (RGC), Hong Kong SAR. The Making and Unmaking of the Public Sphere: Outcomes of Political Disagreement, Expression Avoidance, and a Filtered Information Repertoire. [445,520 HKD] Completed.

• Zhang, X. (2023). Will political disagreement silence political expression? The role of information repertoire filtration and discussion network heterogeneity. Human Communication Research. Online first. doi: 10.1093/hcr/hqad009. [Q1 (top 12%) in SSCI - Communication, 2021 JCR IF = 5.333, Oxford University Press.]
  
• Zhu, R. & Zhang, X. (2023). Public sector’s misinformation debunking during the public health campaign: A case of Hong Kong. Health Promotion International. Online first. doi: 10.1093/heapro/daad053. [Q1 in SSCI - Health Policy & Services, 2021 JCR IF = 3.734, Oxford University Press.]
  
• Zhang, X., Zhu, R., Chen, L., Zhang, Z., & Chen, M. (2022). News from Messenger? A cross-national comparative study of news media’s audience engagement strategies via Facebook Messenger chatbots. Digital Journalism. Online first. doi: 10.1080/21670811.2022.2145329. [Q1 (top 5%) in SSCI - Communication, 2021 JCR IF = 6.847, Sage Publications Ltd.]
  
• Zhang, X., Lin, W.-Y., & Dutton, W. H. (2022). The political consequences of online disagreement: The filtering of communication networks in a polarized political context. Social Media + Society. Online first, doi: 10.1177/20563051221114391. [Q1 (top 15%) in SSCI - Communication, 2021 JCR IF = 4.636, Sage Publications Ltd.]
  
• Zhang, X. & Zhu, R. (2021). How source-level and message-level factors influence journalists’ social media visibility during a public health crisis. Journalism. Online first. doi: 10.1177/14648849211023153. [Q1 (top 16%) in SSCI - Communication, 2020 JCR IF = 4.436, Sage Publications Ltd.]
• Liang, H., & Zhang, X. (2021). Partisan bias of perceived incivility and its political consequences: Evidence from survey experiments in Hong Kong. Journal of Communication, 71(3). doi: 10.1093/joc/ jqab008 [Q1 (top 6%) in SSCI - Communication, 2020 JCR IF = 7.270, Oxford Academic.]
• Zhang, X. (2021). Innovation and conformity in music reproduction: A network analytic approach to contestants’ song covering in reality shows in Mainland China and the US. International Communication Gazette, 83(7). doi: 10.1177/17480485211014372. [SSCI - Communication, 2020 JCR IF = 1.859, Sage Publications Ltd.]
• Zhang, X. & Zhong, Z.-J. (2020). Extending media system dependency theory to informational media use and environmentalism: A cross-national study. Telematics & Informatics. Online first. doi: 10.1016/j.tele.2020.101378. [Q1 (top 12%) in SSCI – Information Science and Library Science, 2019 JCR IF = 4.139, Elsevier.]
• Zhang, X. & Ho, J. C. F. (2020). Exploring the fragmentation of the representation of data-driven journalism in the Twittersphere: A network analytics approach. Social Science Computer Review. Online first. doi: 10.1177/0894439320905522. [Q1 (top 13%) in SSCI - Social Sciences Interdisciplinary, 2019 JCR IF = 2.696, Sage Publications Ltd.]
• Zhang, X. (2019). Effects of freedom restoration, language variety, and issue type on psychological reactance. Health Communication. Online first. doi: 10.1080/10410236.2019.1631565. (Q2 in SSCI - Communication, 2018 JCR IF = 1.846, Routledge Journals, Taylor & Francis Ltd.)
• Zhang, X. & Lin, W.-Y. (2018). Stoking the fires of participation: Extending the Gamson hypothesis on social media use and elite-challenging political engagement. Computers in Human Behavior, 79, 217-226. doi: 10.1016/j.chb.2017.10.036. [Q1 (top 12%) in SSCI – Psychology (multidisciplinary), 2017 JCR IF = 3.536, Elsevier.]