Nikki Usher

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign | UIUC · Journalism

Despite the looming crisis in journalism, a research–practice gap plagues the news industry. This volume seeks to change the research–practice gap, with timely scholarly research on the most pressing problems facing the news industry today, translated for a non-specialist audience. Contributions from academics and journalists are brought together i...

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 wi...

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...

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 i...

Hacker journalism is a distinctive term in journalism, whereby journalists who can program as well as programmers interested in journalism embrace foundational ideals of hacker culture and their intersection with journalism. Hacks/Hackers is a distinct movement and grassroots organization that reflects this global impetus, whereby hacks (journalist...

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 th...

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 chara...

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...

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...

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 th...

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 the...

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...

The 2007–2009 financial crisis and its lingering aftereffects have provoked strong reactions about business journalism as a fundamentally failed form of news that does not adequately examine the economy. To move the discourse about the financial crisis forward, it is important to understand how journalists produce and create business news. This...

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 innovati...

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 corporati...

This collection of original essays brings a dramatically different perspective to bear on the contemporary 'crisis of journalism'. Rather than seeing technological and economic change as the primary causes of current anxieties, The Crisis of Journalism Reconsidered draws attention to the role played by the cultural commitments of journalism itself....

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, a...

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 examp...

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 the...

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...

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 transnat...

Making News at The New York Times is the first in-depth portrait of the nation’s, if not the world's, premier newspaper in the digital age. It presents a lively chronicle of months spent in the newsroom observing daily conversations, meetings, and journalists at work. We see Page One meetings, articles developed for online and print from start to f...

Anderson Cooper has routinely graced the list of Out Magazine’s top 50 most powerful celebrities, appearing, perhaps most memorably, in 2008 next to Jodie Foster. But the pictures were pasted onto Popsicle sticks, held on to by an anonymous man and woman in suits, a clear reminder that these two celebrities were indeed firmly hiding in the glass cl...

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 t...

Across the industry, we are seeing a wide-sweeping trend of newsrooms uprooting themselves: AH Belo, Gannett, MediaNews, Advance, Gate-House, Cox--small newspapers and large ones alike are listing their newsrooms for sale. Everyone from the private owners of the Syracuse Media Group, to the owners behind the Boston Herald, has moved buildings....

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, pr...

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. Usi...

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-...

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...

Visual images mediated through the Web are no longer static — increasingly, they are offered as an interactive experience that invites and requires user assent and participation. Through a New York Times Internet graphic focused on the Iraq War, this paper examines how interactive images demand a rethinking of current theories of visual argument. S...

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 rethi...

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...

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 rethi...

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, spe...

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 i...

This article reviews the current crisis facing journalism⎯the decline of newspapers and the resulting loss of original reporting that is necessary for a well-functioning democracy ⎯and offers a legal analysis of proposed new models for newspapers. Specifically, we consider two of the most touted alternatives to the failing commercial model of newsp...

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 productio...

During the Israel-Hezbollh War of 2006, bloggers caught Reuters publishing doctored images from Lebanon. Known by bloggers as Fauxtography, the scandal provides an important site to analyze the ability of blogs to challenge mainstream media. One blog in particular was almost single-handedly responsible for unearthing and for publicizing the scandal...