Rob Wells is an associate professor of journalism and has been teaching at the University of Arkansas since the Fall 2016 semester. He earned his doctorate in philosophy in Journalism Studies at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism. His academic research is in business journalism, media history, data journalism and technology. He was a 2012 Reynolds Visiting Professor at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, a program sponsored by the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism.  As an adjunct instructor, he taught reporting classes at the Merrill College between 2010-2016. He is writing a book about the problems and future of business journalism, to be published by the University of Illinois Press in 2019.

Wells is the former deputy bureau chief for Dow Jones Newswires/Wall Street Journal in Washington, D.C., where he oversaw 22 reporters who covered real-time business, economics and financial news in the nation’s capital. Prior to this, he was a business reporter for Dow Jones, Bloomberg News and The Associated Press. He holds a master’s degree in liberal studies from St. John’s College in Annapolis, where he studied philosophy, literature, history and political science.