Francois Nel

Biography

An organisational innovation specialist with broad international experience, François Nel is an award-winning journalist, educator, researcher, author, and consultant who has managed departments and led teams to devise and deliver ground-breaking research, courses, and transformation strategies and programmes that support innovating organisations, entrepreneurs, and students inside and outside of academia.
He is currently Reader/Associate Professor of Media Innovation at the University of Central Lancashire, home to England's oldest journalism programme. There, he is Associate Director of the Institute for Creativity, Community and Culture Centre and the Media Innovation Studio, where he leads applied research projects and supervises doctoral students. He initiated and leads the pioneering part-time, distance-learning postgraduate Journalism Innovation and Leadership Programme, which has since 2020 been supported by the Google News Initiative and International Media Support (IMS), the Denmark-based media development agency. He has been a Visiting Research Fellow of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford and remains associated with Green Templeton College.
Named a National Teaching Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in 2013, he became the first media specialist to be named a Fellow of the European Entrepreneurship Educators Programme (3EP). As such, he is amongst a select group of 25 UK academics and one of only 75 in Europe awarded the prestigious 3EP Fellowship, which aims to support and develop enterprise education. He has earned both the Harris Award for Excellence in Curriculum Innovation and the Harris Award for Research Excellence at UCLan, been named Educator of the Year by the Public Relations Institute of South Africa and won the Specialist Press Association's overall Pica Prize for Consumer Journalism for an investigation into illegal diamond smuggling in South Africa. He is a co-founder of the Digital Editors Network (UK) and the first academic invited to join the World Editors Forum of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA).
François takes a systems approach to his research which considers innovation and entrepreneurial challenges across individual, organisational, and industry levels, alongside the associated concerns As an active researcher contributing to scholarly and industry discourses, François is a frequent conference speaker and has contributed to UCLan's submission to the Research Excellence Framework 2014 in Communication, Culture & Media Studies which included "World Leading" scholarship, His work has also been identified as a potential impact case study for the university’s next submission in 2029.
François currently leads several externally funded action research projects, including:
● News Futures 2035 (2022-24), a multi-stakeholder foresight study that brings together industry, policy, civil society, and academic actors, is a response to widespread concerns about the future of trustworthy public interest news and is funded by the Google News Initiative.
● HEIght (Higher Education Innovation and Growth) Project study (2022-23). François initiated and led the Horizon Europe-funded study across four European countries that have developed tools to map, measure and monitor the innovation culture of organisations quotients (ICQ) of organisations and individual innovation propensity (IPQ), which has been identified as the best practice case study by European Institute for Innovation & Technology and contributed to the University of Central Lancashire being named Entrepreneurial University of the Year 2023 in the prestigious Educate North Awards.
He is also the principal investigator for two longitudinal studies for WAN-IFRA, the world news media. Since 2010, he has conducted the annual World News Publishers Outlook study in 10 languages, which underpins a variety of scholarly and industry outputs, including WAN-IFRA's World Press Trends & Outlook reports. He also holds and provides annual analyses of the World Press Trends database.
He is the author of two books for Oxford University Press and more than 30 book chapters, journal articles, papers and industry reports that have appeared in, amongst others, Journalism Practice, Journalism Studies, Journalism and Mass Communication Educator, Nordic Journal of Media Management, and the Rhodes Journalism Review. He is an associate editor of the International Journal of Media Management and Entrepreneurship (IJMME) and frequently reviews scholarly publications and grant applications. François is a committed academic mentor with experience supervising researchers at undergraduate, master's, doctoral and post-doc levels.
He earned a BA (cum laude) in Business Communication and English from North Park University in Chicago and an MA in English from Winthrop University in South Carolina, and a PhD in Journalism from City, University of London.