Nikki Usher

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 journalism, offering a theoretical intervention for understanding this phenomenon and its potential implications for newswork. Building on the literature from computer science and journalism, we explore the concept of open source as both a structural framework of distributed development and a cultural framework of pro-social hacker ethics. We identify four values of open-source culture that connect with and depart from journalism—transparency, tinkering, iteration, and participation—and assess their opportunities for rethinking journalism innovation.

AL JAZEERA ENGLISH ONLINE

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 knowledge creation. Through interviews and observations, findings reveal that the news organization’s institutional culture plays a tremendous role in shaping how journalists use and understand metrics. The findings are interpreted through an analysis of news norms studies of the social construction of technology.

News Startups as Agents of Innovation

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 how journalism is changing—or is not. In identifying and touting the superiority of their technological innovations, the manifestos simultaneously affirm and critique existing journalistic practices while rethinking longstanding boundaries between journalism and technology.

Code, Collaboration, And The Future Of Journalism

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 sought to understand just how journalists and technologists would engage through this organization: what kinds of interactions would occur, and what factors might facilitate collaboration? Drawing upon the science and technology studies concept of “trading zones,” we examine how Hacks/Hackers functions as an informal and transitory trading zone through which journalists and technologists can casually meet and coordinate. The level of engagement between the two groups, we found, depends on a set of social and structural factors, including institutional support and the leadership of key volunteers, and the depth of that engagement depends on sufficient mutual understanding among journalists and hackers. We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding the challenges and opportunities presented through the intersection of journalism and technology.

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 events leading up to the crisis. This article provides the first account of how business journalists in the USA responded to the crisis, and the data suggest two important concerns: the first, a serious lack of media accountability; the second, the need for clearer normative expectations for watchdog journalism.

RECOVERY FROM DISASTER

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 complicated by their personal experience. Second, journalists saw the newspaper as an advocate for the city. These findings suggest that theories about news production and about objectivity should be considered more contextually.

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 organizational identity limit agency, but that journalists are more purposive actors than they are given credit. Agency can most clearly shape structure when new technology is introduced.

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 cultural meaning. The article relies on a two-part field study of The Miami Herald for data. The article finds that physical newsroom moves are perceived to impact coverage, that objects inside the newsroom can also be symbols of newsroom decline and invigoration, and that saying goodbye to a building gives journalists the sense they may perhaps be losing their institutional relevance.

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 in the innovation of journalism through open-source software. Drawing on the science and technology studies concepts of trading zones and boundary objects, we explore how distinct understandings about news and technology converged, diverged, and ultimately blended around three thematic ambitions: making news more process-oriented, participatory, and socially curated. This window onto boundary negotiations in journalism provides a glimpse into the future development of news and its norms and values, as programmers and their ethics assume a greater role in the journalistic field – in the very heart of some of its leading institutions.

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 their role as authoritative truth-tellers in relation to audiences, the competition, and their own position in the profession. As newspaper coverage becomes more like local TV, these metropolitan newspaper journalists worry that a breaking news strategy, while potentially necessary, is also questionable and even potentially harmful, but nonetheless pursue it.