Nikki Usher
Biographic Data
| ID | 292198 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Nikki Usher |
| GIVEN NAMES | Nikki |
| FAMILY NAME | Usher |
| SIGNATURE | USHER N |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of San Diego |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7297-4427 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 47 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 787 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 46 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 16 |
Generative AI and Journalism: Hype, The Always Already New, and Directions for Scholarly Imagination
This essay pushes against hype about generative AI in both journalism and journalism scholarship. Emergent questions around the black box nature of AI, concerns about information disorder, and problems with the theft of intellectual property are recontextualized with a new focus – one that demands scholars think outside of the newsroom, center the natural and the cultural elements of journalism, and ultimately, remain critical about the always al…
Amplifying Extremism: Small Town Politicians, Media Storms, and American Journalism
Within a week, a no-name Republican state representative from a town of 384 people in Illinois catapulted from obscurity to a prime-time appearance on Fox News' Ingraham Angle. This newly empowered politician, Darren Bailey, would go on to steer the pro-business Republican party in Illinois toward extremism. Democratic backsliding emerges across all levels of politics, but the threats posed by small-town politicians have been overshadowed by nati…
Why news organizations “platform” illiberal politics: Understanding news production, economic insolvency, and anti-democratic pressure through CNN’s 2023 Trump Town Hall
This article discusses how the economic insolvency of the contemporary mainstream media makes it particularly vulnerable to manipulation by illiberal political actors. Through a case study of CNN’s 2023 Trump Town Hall event, this article argues that democratic backsliding itself has become a potent constraint structuring news production routines and news decision-making. The metajournalistic discourse about the event maligned the role of CNN in …
Introducing: The JOC academic posse cut
Journal Article Introducing: the JOC academic posse cut Get access Charlton McIlwain, Charlton McIlwain Media, Culture, and Communication, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, New York University, New York, NY, USA Corresponding author: Charlton McIlwain. Email: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Nikki Usher Nikki Usher Department of Communication, College of Arts and S…
How Loud Does the Watchdog Bark? A Reconsideration of Losing Local Journalism, News Nonprofits, and Political Corruption
Journalism has long been presumed to serve as a check on the powerful, shedding light on wrongdoing; however, as local newspapers reach market failure, extant theory predicts corruption will go unchecked. We operationalize corruption as federal prosecutions for public corruption (PPCs), defined by the US Department of Justice as crimes involving the abuse of public trust by federal, state, and local public officials. We examine changes in the loc…
Delegitimizing Rural Public Health Departments: How Decaying Local News Ecologies, Misinformation, and Radicalization Undermine Community Storytelling Networks
This article considers the public communication challenges that health officials in rural America faced during the COVID-19 pandemic. I analyze the role that public health officials played in communicating news and information about the pandemic in 29 rural counties in Illinois. These officials were challenged by a diminished reporting capacity among local media outlets, and by a political radicalization of local Republicans, who no longer regard…
Media Policy for an Informed Citizenry: Revisiting the Information Needs of Communities for Democracy in Crisis
This volume of The ANNALS revisits and updates a call made by scholars in the early 2010s for public policy to respond to the market failure of local news. Organized into four parts—policy, supply, demand, and adaptation—this volume is committed to the proposition that people need information about their communities in order to navigate everyday life, and that those information needs are inextricably intertwined with other basic necessities like …
Localizing Covid-19 Public Health Department Outreach on Digital Platforms: The Role of Discoverability, Reach, and Moderation for Illinois’ Covid-19 Vaccination Rates
The politicization of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in the United States and abroad has received significant scholarly attention, particularly surrounding misinformation circulating on social media among millions of users. However there has been far less attention paid to how platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and others impact vaccine uptake within local, geographically specific communities. Local public health departments view platforms as…
The Real Problems with the Problem of News Deserts: Toward Rooting Place, Precision, and Positionality in Scholarship on Local News and Democracy
While “news deserts” are rhetorically powerful, we argue the concept is deeply problematic due to its normative presumptions and its descriptive fuzziness. The concern over the loss of local journalism in the U.S. has become a moral panic. While US local journalism is in market failure, at least when conceptualized as a professional, commercial newspaper enterprise, current scholarship and public discourse about “news deserts” and the loss of loc…
Journalism as historical repair work: Addressing Present Injustice Through the Second Draft of History
As part of contemporary racial reckoning, institutions are acknowledging their historical legacies of racism and discrimination. Media institutions, given their role in the social construction of reality, have been called to account by racial justice activists for perpetuating the white-dominant status quo. We develop a framework for recognizing and interpreting efforts at historical repair work in journalism, second draft of history journalism (…
News for the Rich, White, and Blue: How Place and Power Distort American Journalism
In News for the Rich, White, and Blue , Nikki Usher recasts the challenges facing journalism in terms of place, power, and inequality. Drawing on more than a decade of field research, she illuminates how journalists decide what becomes news and how news organizations strategize about the future.
Journalism Research That Matters
Academic Caregivers on Organizational and Community Resilience in Academia (Fuck Individual Resilience)
Crises, whether society-wide or personal, are endemic to the human condition. Yet academia and its associated institutions persist in having insufficient scaffolding to support its members during periods of crisis. No one knows this more acutely than academic caregivers of children, elders, disabled adults, and other loved ones with special needs. Academic caregivers are disproportionately women, and the COVID-19 pandemic brought to light our pre…
News cartography and epistemic authority in the era of big data: Journalists as map-makers, map-users, and map-subjects
Although the destabilization of journalism’s epistemic authority has been widely discussed, one critical element has been underexplored—the role of place. For journalists, claiming provenance over “where” has enabled control over a domain of knowledge, and one key means for doing so has been through news cartography, now rendered digitally. However, digital news cartography (digital news maps) exposes journalists’ epistemic authority to new chall…
Objects of journalism, revised: Rethinking materiality in journalism studies through emotion, culture and ‘unexpected objects
Despite attempts to reinvigorate studies of materiality in Journalism Studies, research has often failed to move beyond a narrow application of actor-network theory focused on the affordances of digital objects of journalism. As a result, journalism studies has missed a productive opportunity to consider the emotional, cultural and aesthetic potential of object-oriented study. This article makes the case for focusing on how objects of journalism …
The New York Times in Trump’s America: A Failure for Liberals, A Champion for Liberalism
Why the Left can’t stand The New York Times,” in the Columbia Journalism Review’s Winter 2019 issue, offers emblematic rundown that liberals see as The New York Times’ shortcomings in its version
Sharing Knowledge and 'Microbubbles: Epistemic Communities and Insularity in US Political Journalism
This article examines the peer-to-peer dynamics of Washington political journalists as Communities of Practice (CoPs) to better understand how journalists connect to and learn from each other and establish conventional knowledge. We employ inductive computational analysis that combines social network analysis of journalists' Twitter interactions with a qualitative, thematic analysis of journalists' work histories, organizational affiliations, and…
Putting “Place” in the Center of Journalism Research: A Way Forward to Understand Challenges to Trust and Knowledge in News
The U.S. journalism industry is facing unprecedented challenges from questions of economic stability, rising antimedia sentiment among the government and the public, new technologies that have democratizing effects on news production, and the lowest levels of trust in journalism in decades. At the same time, the United States is facing structural inequality and political polarization that has taken on a distinctly place-based dimension. Taken tog…
Framing in a Fractured Democracy: Impacts of Digital Technology on Ideology, Power and Cascading Network Activation
With the maturation of social media as a form of communication and the decline in mainstream institutional journalism, scholars must reevaluate the processes through which information is produced, distributed, assimilated, and acted upon. We consider five important, new, digitally enabled “pump-valves” in the flow of socio-political information and frames: platforms, analytics, algorithms, ideological media, and rogue actors. We revise the cascad…
Hacks, Hackers, and the Expansive Boundaries of Journalism
This chapter begins with an examination of some of the complexities and opportunities afforded by the rise of these computationally minded journalists, collectively discussed here as 'interactive journalists' – an umbrella term that delineates this fusion of programming, data, and journalism from other points in journalism's long entanglement with computation. Newsrooms have had internal and externally focused hackathons to drive innovation, taki…
The Midlife Crisis of the Network Society
The network society is moving into some sort of middle age, or has at least normalized into the daily set of expectations people have for how they live their lives, not to mention consume news and information. In their adolescence, the technological and temporal affordances that have come with these new digital technologies were supposed to make the world better, or least they could have. There was much we did not foresee, such as the way that th…
Twitter Makes It Worse: Political Journalists, Gendered Echo Chambers, and the Amplification of Gender Bias
Given both the historical legacy and the contemporary awareness about gender inequity in journalism and politics as well as the increasing importance of Twitter in political communication, this article considers whether the platform makes some of the existing gender bias against women in political journalism even worse. Using a framework that characterizes journalists’ Twitter behavior in terms of the dimensions of their peer-to-peer relationship…
Journalism’s biggest challenge? Journalists
Re-Thinking Trust in the News: A material approach through “Objects of Journalism”
This article argues that trust in journalism is a critical mechanism in social cohesion. However, trust research in journalism has a critical flaw, since trust is measured as news consumption, while journalists’ roles are considered via questions of authority. However, scholars have thought about trust in limited ways that have failed to address the relational nature of trust that includes journalists, audiences, sources, and other social actors …
Venture-backed News Startups and the Field of Journalism: Challenges, changes, and consistencies
This article is an empirical investigation of 18 venture-backed news startups from around the United States and Europe. The central concern here is to examine yet another new entrant to the journalism ecosystem by asking how venture-backed news startups both depart from and replicate traditional journalism. These news startups aim to solve what they see as problems with journalism in novel ways, yet their concerns mirror larger historical critiqu…
Open source and journalism: Toward New Frameworks for Imagining News Innovation
Journalists and technologists increasingly are organizing and collaborating, both formally and informally, across major news organizations and via grassroots networks on an international scale. This intersection of so-called ‘hacks and hackers’ carries with it a shared interest in finding technological solutions for news, particularly through open-source software programming. This article critically evaluates the phenomenon of open source in jour…
News Startups as Agents of Innovation: For-profit digital news startup manifestos as metajournalistic discourse
For-profit digital news startups backed by large investors, venture capital, and technology entrepreneurs have taken on an increasingly significant role in the journalism industry. This article examines 10 startups by focusing on the manifestos these new organizations offer when they introduce themselves to the public. These manifestos are an example of metajournalistic discourse, or interpretive discourse about journalism, that publicly define h…
Interactive Journalism: Hackers, Data, and Code
Interactive journalism has transformed the newsroom. Emerging out of changes in technology, culture, and economics, this new specialty uses a visual presentation of storytelling that allows users to interact with the reporting of information. Today it stands at a nexus: part of the traditional newsroom, yet still novel enough to contribute innovative practices and thinking to the industry. This book brings together a comprehensive portrait of not…
Al Jazeera English Online: Understanding Web metrics and news production when a quantified audience is not a commodified audience
Al Jazeera English is the Arab world's largest purveyor of English language news to an international audience. This article provides an in-depth examination of how its website employs Web metrics for tracking and understanding audience behavior. The Al Jazeera Network remains sheltered from the general economic concerns around the news industry, providing a unique setting in which to understand how these tools influence newsroom production and kn…
Breaking news production processes in US metropolitan newspapers: Immediacy and journalistic authority
Incremental updates to breaking news stories online have become embedded in newspapers in the 24/7 online era. This article reviews four US metropolitan newspapers, using field observations and interviews to examine how journalists choose breaking news stories and their rationale for these continuous updates. Specifically, the article explores the connection between temporality and authority, positing that journalists use these updates to retain …
Venture-backed News Startups and the Field of Journalism: Challenges, changes, and consistencies
This article is an empirical investigation of 18 venture-backed news startups from around the United States and Europe. The central concern here is to examine yet another new entrant to the journalism ecosystem by asking how venture-backed news startups both depart from and replicate traditional journalism. These news startups aim to solve what they see as problems with journalism in novel ways, yet their concerns mirror larger historical critiqu…
Code, Collaboration, And The Future Of Journalism: A case study of the Hacks/Hackers global network
Amid the rise of computational and data-driven forms of journalism, it is important to consider the institutions, interactions, and processes that aim to help the social worlds of journalism and technology come together and collaborate around a common cause of news innovation. This paper examines one of the most prominent such efforts: the transnational grassroots organization called Hacks/Hackers. Through a two-year qualitative case study, we so…
Goodbye to the news: How Out-of-Work Journalists Assess Enduring News Values and the New Media Landscape
This article explores the cultural dimensions of the demise of legacy newspapers by looking at the words of journalists who have either been laid off, who have taken a ‘voluntary buyout,’ or who have left the industry in order to stay ahead of what they see as inevitable. Their voices are incorporated here through their goodbye letters, emails, speeches, columns and blog postings — their ‘final’ musings about the news industry in a new media worl…
Trading zones, boundary objects, and the pursuit of news innovation: A case study of journalists and programmers
Amid growing calls for greater collaboration between journalism and computer programming, this article examines a salient case study that reveals processes of communication, exchange, and work production at the intersection of these social and occupational worlds. We focus on a key stage of the Knight-Mozilla News Technology partnership – namely, an online ‘Learning Lab’ through which 60 individuals sought to coordinate around a shared interest i…
Twitter Makes It Worse: Political Journalists, Gendered Echo Chambers, and the Amplification of Gender Bias
Given both the historical legacy and the contemporary awareness about gender inequity in journalism and politics as well as the increasing importance of Twitter in political communication, this article considers whether the platform makes some of the existing gender bias against women in political journalism even worse. Using a framework that characterizes journalists’ Twitter behavior in terms of the dimensions of their peer-to-peer relationship…
Newsroom moves and the newspaper crisis evaluated: Space, Place, and Cultural Meaning
Across the United States, newspapers are physically relocating their headquarters to smaller spaces, often away from the centers of downtown. This is the latest manifestation of the newspaper crisis manifest through a tangible and visible public manner. This article investigates these newsroom moves through a discussion of space, looking at why these moves matter by examining their impact on how journalists do their work and journalists’ sense of…
Ignored, uninterested, and the blame game: How The New York Times, Marketplace , and TheStreet distanced themselves from preventing the 2007–2009 financial crisis
This article relies on interviews with business journalists at The New York Times, Marketplace public radio, and TheStreet to understand how journalists retrospectively considered their responsibilities following the 2007–2009 financial crisis. Watchdog journalism is looked at through a variety of scholarly perspectives to understand the disconnect between theory and practice as journalists across all these outlets distance themselves from the ev…
News cartography and epistemic authority in the era of big data: Journalists as map-makers, map-users, and map-subjects
Although the destabilization of journalism’s epistemic authority has been widely discussed, one critical element has been underexplored—the role of place. For journalists, claiming provenance over “where” has enabled control over a domain of knowledge, and one key means for doing so has been through news cartography, now rendered digitally. However, digital news cartography (digital news maps) exposes journalists’ epistemic authority to new chall…
Re-Thinking Trust in the News: A material approach through “Objects of Journalism”
This article argues that trust in journalism is a critical mechanism in social cohesion. However, trust research in journalism has a critical flaw, since trust is measured as news consumption, while journalists’ roles are considered via questions of authority. However, scholars have thought about trust in limited ways that have failed to address the relational nature of trust that includes journalists, audiences, sources, and other social actors …
Marketplace public radio and news routines reconsidered: Between structures and agents
This article is based on a five-month in-depth ethnographic study of Marketplace, a US public radio business news show. While older news ethnographies have tended to focus more on organizational explanations for newswork, this article adds to a growing body of literature that shows the nuanced relationship between individuals and organizations. Using Giddens’ structuration as a framework, this article argues that structures such as time and organ…
The Real Problems with the Problem of News Deserts: Toward Rooting Place, Precision, and Positionality in Scholarship on Local News and Democracy
While “news deserts” are rhetorically powerful, we argue the concept is deeply problematic due to its normative presumptions and its descriptive fuzziness. The concern over the loss of local journalism in the U.S. has become a moral panic. While US local journalism is in market failure, at least when conceptualized as a professional, commercial newspaper enterprise, current scholarship and public discourse about “news deserts” and the loss of loc…
Recovery From Disaster: How journalists at the New Orleans Times-Picayune understand the role of a post-Katrina newspaper
This paper examines how journalists at the Times-Picayune in New Orleans understand the role of the local newspaper during the recovery stage of Hurricane Katrina. Qualitative one-on-one interviews were conducted in New Orleans to gain the perspectives of these journalists. These interviews were analyzed in the context of theories of news production. Two key findings emerged. First, journalists saw their role as “objective” recorders of events co…
Objects of journalism, revised: Rethinking materiality in journalism studies through emotion, culture and ‘unexpected objects
Despite attempts to reinvigorate studies of materiality in Journalism Studies, research has often failed to move beyond a narrow application of actor-network theory focused on the affordances of digital objects of journalism. As a result, journalism studies has missed a productive opportunity to consider the emotional, cultural and aesthetic potential of object-oriented study. This article makes the case for focusing on how objects of journalism …
Crowd-Funded Journalism: Crowd-Funded Journalism
Crowd-funded journalism is a novel business model in which journalists rely on micropayments from ordinary people to finance their reporting. Based on analyses of the database of Spot.us, a pioneering crowd-funded journalism website, we examine the impact of crowd-funded journalism on the news produced. We apply a uses and gratifications approach to study consumers' choices when they donate to crowd-funded journalism and find that consumers are m…
Journalism as historical repair work: Addressing Present Injustice Through the Second Draft of History
As part of contemporary racial reckoning, institutions are acknowledging their historical legacies of racism and discrimination. Media institutions, given their role in the social construction of reality, have been called to account by racial justice activists for perpetuating the white-dominant status quo. We develop a framework for recognizing and interpreting efforts at historical repair work in journalism, second draft of history journalism (…
The Appropriation/Amplification Model of Citizen Journalism: An account of structural limitations and the political economy of participatory content creation
A collaborative relationship between citizen journalists and professional journalists has long been an aspiration for many media scholars. While tensions surrounding professional control are significant, scholars also have to consider the structural dynamics of content online and across social media networks, particularly in an era of the corporatized and commercialized Web. The rise of social discovery tools and algorithms is also addressed. Thi…
The late great International Herald Tribune and The New York Times: Global media, space, time, print, and online coordination in a 24/7 networked world
This article provides an empirical, field-based study of the production processes of transnational media outlet, the International Herald Tribune, as it negotiates and coordinates workflow and content with The New York Times. Using Manuel Castells’ concept of the space of flows, the article provides additional nuance to understand the relationship between material constructs and networked information. Time zones and geolocation remain important; …
How Loud Does the Watchdog Bark? A Reconsideration of Losing Local Journalism, News Nonprofits, and Political Corruption
Journalism has long been presumed to serve as a check on the powerful, shedding light on wrongdoing; however, as local newspapers reach market failure, extant theory predicts corruption will go unchecked. We operationalize corruption as federal prosecutions for public corruption (PPCs), defined by the US Department of Justice as crimes involving the abuse of public trust by federal, state, and local public officials. We examine changes in the loc…
The New York Times in Trump’s America: A Failure for Liberals, A Champion for Liberalism
Why the Left can’t stand The New York Times,” in the Columbia Journalism Review’s Winter 2019 issue, offers emblematic rundown that liberals see as The New York Times’ shortcomings in its version
The Midlife Crisis of the Network Society
The network society is moving into some sort of middle age, or has at least normalized into the daily set of expectations people have for how they live their lives, not to mention consume news and information. In their adolescence, the technological and temporal affordances that have come with these new digital technologies were supposed to make the world better, or least they could have. There was much we did not foresee, such as the way that th…
Recovery From Disaster: How journalists at the New Orleans Times-Picayune understand the role of a post-Katrina newspaper
This paper examines how journalists at the Times-Picayune in New Orleans understand the role of the local newspaper during the recovery stage of Hurricane Katrina. Qualitative one-on-one interviews were conducted in New Orleans to gain the perspectives of these journalists. These interviews were analyzed in the context of theories of news production. Two key findings emerged. First, journalists saw their role as “objective” recorders of events co…
Resurrecting the 1938 St. Louis Post-Dispatch Symposium on the Freedom of the Press: Examining its contributions and their implications for today
In 1938, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch convened a symposium on the freedom of the press in response to a letter from President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The President hoped to have a "national symposium" to discuss whether a free press could truly exist in a for-profit media system. The Symposium on the Freedom of the Press brought together 120 public intellectuals to discuss the matter. Here, I attempt to reacquaint scholars with this forgotten colle…
News at work: Imitation in an age of information
Boczkowski's new book is aptly titled as it alludes to three of the main objectives in his work. First, he offers an ethnography of the journalists' news work in an online newsroom. Second, his study broadens the idea that news consumption has been transformed to what we do at work, rather than what we do in the home. Third, Boczkowski underscores how changes in journalism are at work in influencing social, political, and economic forces. The mai…
Goodbye to the news: How Out-of-Work Journalists Assess Enduring News Values and the New Media Landscape
This article explores the cultural dimensions of the demise of legacy newspapers by looking at the words of journalists who have either been laid off, who have taken a ‘voluntary buyout,’ or who have left the industry in order to stay ahead of what they see as inevitable. Their voices are incorporated here through their goodbye letters, emails, speeches, columns and blog postings — their ‘final’ musings about the news industry in a new media worl…
Service Journalism as Community Experience: Personal technology and personal finance at The New York Times
This paper looks at service journalism and its evolution as a community platform through blog comments and social media through a case study of two sections of The New York Times' business section: the personal finance section and the personal technology section. The paper proceeds through a discussion of the importance of networked journalism, and relies on in-depth qualitative interviews with the journalists closest to the decisions being made …
Reshaping the public radio newsroom for the digital future
This article provides an in-depth analysis of the United States' National Public Radio's journey as it strives to become a more web- and multimedia-savvy company. The article offers a qualitative account of a significant transition phase in the news organization's development: what started as a 400-person retraining of the newsroom ended as a rethinking of the newsroom's digital development. The article examines the way in which NPR created the c…
WikiLeaks: News in the Networked Era , by Charlie Beckett and James Ball
Why does WikiLeaks fascinate those interested in journalism, political communication, policy, or simply the future of the Internet? Perhaps it is because WikiLeaks, especially after its role in obt
Ignored, uninterested, and the blame game: How The New York Times, Marketplace , and TheStreet distanced themselves from preventing the 2007–2009 financial crisis
This article relies on interviews with business journalists at The New York Times, Marketplace public radio, and TheStreet to understand how journalists retrospectively considered their responsibilities following the 2007–2009 financial crisis. Watchdog journalism is looked at through a variety of scholarly perspectives to understand the disconnect between theory and practice as journalists across all these outlets distance themselves from the ev…
Marketplace public radio and news routines reconsidered: Between structures and agents
This article is based on a five-month in-depth ethnographic study of Marketplace, a US public radio business news show. While older news ethnographies have tended to focus more on organizational explanations for newswork, this article adds to a growing body of literature that shows the nuanced relationship between individuals and organizations. Using Giddens’ structuration as a framework, this article argues that structures such as time and organ…
Crowd-Funded Journalism: Crowd-Funded Journalism
Crowd-funded journalism is a novel business model in which journalists rely on micropayments from ordinary people to finance their reporting. Based on analyses of the database of Spot.us, a pioneering crowd-funded journalism website, we examine the impact of crowd-funded journalism on the news produced. We apply a uses and gratifications approach to study consumers' choices when they donate to crowd-funded journalism and find that consumers are m…
Open source and journalism: Toward New Frameworks for Imagining News Innovation
Journalists and technologists increasingly are organizing and collaborating, both formally and informally, across major news organizations and via grassroots networks on an international scale. This intersection of so-called ‘hacks and hackers’ carries with it a shared interest in finding technological solutions for news, particularly through open-source software programming. This article critically evaluates the phenomenon of open source in jour…
Al Jazeera English Online: Understanding Web metrics and news production when a quantified audience is not a commodified audience
Al Jazeera English is the Arab world's largest purveyor of English language news to an international audience. This article provides an in-depth examination of how its website employs Web metrics for tracking and understanding audience behavior. The Al Jazeera Network remains sheltered from the general economic concerns around the news industry, providing a unique setting in which to understand how these tools influence newsroom production and kn…
Making News at The New York Times
An ethnographic study of The New York Times’ business desk provides a unique vantage point to see the future for news in the digital age
Anderson Cooper and Jodie Foster: The Glass Closet and Gay Visibility in the Media
Research Article| February 01 2014 Anderson Cooper and Jodie Foster: The Glass Closet and Gay Visibility in the Media Nikki Usher Nikki Usher Nikki Usher, (PhD, University of Southern California) is an assistant professor at the George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs. Usher researches news production, media history, new technology, social media, and the evolving landscape of journalism in the digital age. Search for oth…
Code, Collaboration, And The Future Of Journalism: A case study of the Hacks/Hackers global network
Amid the rise of computational and data-driven forms of journalism, it is important to consider the institutions, interactions, and processes that aim to help the social worlds of journalism and technology come together and collaborate around a common cause of news innovation. This paper examines one of the most prominent such efforts: the transnational grassroots organization called Hacks/Hackers. Through a two-year qualitative case study, we so…
The late great International Herald Tribune and The New York Times: Global media, space, time, print, and online coordination in a 24/7 networked world
This article provides an empirical, field-based study of the production processes of transnational media outlet, the International Herald Tribune, as it negotiates and coordinates workflow and content with The New York Times. Using Manuel Castells’ concept of the space of flows, the article provides additional nuance to understand the relationship between material constructs and networked information. Time zones and geolocation remain important; …
News Startups as Agents of Innovation: For-profit digital news startup manifestos as metajournalistic discourse
For-profit digital news startups backed by large investors, venture capital, and technology entrepreneurs have taken on an increasingly significant role in the journalism industry. This article examines 10 startups by focusing on the manifestos these new organizations offer when they introduce themselves to the public. These manifestos are an example of metajournalistic discourse, or interpretive discourse about journalism, that publicly define h…
Newsroom moves and the newspaper crisis evaluated: Space, Place, and Cultural Meaning
Across the United States, newspapers are physically relocating their headquarters to smaller spaces, often away from the centers of downtown. This is the latest manifestation of the newspaper crisis manifest through a tangible and visible public manner. This article investigates these newsroom moves through a discussion of space, looking at why these moves matter by examining their impact on how journalists do their work and journalists’ sense of…
The Appropriation/Amplification Model of Citizen Journalism: An account of structural limitations and the political economy of participatory content creation
A collaborative relationship between citizen journalists and professional journalists has long been an aspiration for many media scholars. While tensions surrounding professional control are significant, scholars also have to consider the structural dynamics of content online and across social media networks, particularly in an era of the corporatized and commercialized Web. The rise of social discovery tools and algorithms is also addressed. Thi…
Interactive Journalism: Hackers, Data, and Code
Interactive journalism has transformed the newsroom. Emerging out of changes in technology, culture, and economics, this new specialty uses a visual presentation of storytelling that allows users to interact with the reporting of information. Today it stands at a nexus: part of the traditional newsroom, yet still novel enough to contribute innovative practices and thinking to the industry. This book brings together a comprehensive portrait of not…
Trading zones, boundary objects, and the pursuit of news innovation: A case study of journalists and programmers
Amid growing calls for greater collaboration between journalism and computer programming, this article examines a salient case study that reveals processes of communication, exchange, and work production at the intersection of these social and occupational worlds. We focus on a key stage of the Knight-Mozilla News Technology partnership – namely, an online ‘Learning Lab’ through which 60 individuals sought to coordinate around a shared interest i…
Re-Thinking Trust in the News: A material approach through “Objects of Journalism”
This article argues that trust in journalism is a critical mechanism in social cohesion. However, trust research in journalism has a critical flaw, since trust is measured as news consumption, while journalists’ roles are considered via questions of authority. However, scholars have thought about trust in limited ways that have failed to address the relational nature of trust that includes journalists, audiences, sources, and other social actors …
Venture-backed News Startups and the Field of Journalism: Challenges, changes, and consistencies
This article is an empirical investigation of 18 venture-backed news startups from around the United States and Europe. The central concern here is to examine yet another new entrant to the journalism ecosystem by asking how venture-backed news startups both depart from and replicate traditional journalism. These news startups aim to solve what they see as problems with journalism in novel ways, yet their concerns mirror larger historical critiqu…
Breaking news production processes in US metropolitan newspapers: Immediacy and journalistic authority
Incremental updates to breaking news stories online have become embedded in newspapers in the 24/7 online era. This article reviews four US metropolitan newspapers, using field observations and interviews to examine how journalists choose breaking news stories and their rationale for these continuous updates. Specifically, the article explores the connection between temporality and authority, positing that journalists use these updates to retain …
Framing in a Fractured Democracy: Impacts of Digital Technology on Ideology, Power and Cascading Network Activation
With the maturation of social media as a form of communication and the decline in mainstream institutional journalism, scholars must reevaluate the processes through which information is produced, distributed, assimilated, and acted upon. We consider five important, new, digitally enabled “pump-valves” in the flow of socio-political information and frames: platforms, analytics, algorithms, ideological media, and rogue actors. We revise the cascad…
Political science (45 works) · Sociology (40 works) · Media studies (37 works) · Media Studies and Communication (35 works) · Journalism (30 works) · Public relations (25 works) · Law (22 works) · Law (21 works) · Social Media and Politics (21 works) · Computer Science (18 works)