Abstract
Associate professor Nikki Usher of George Washington University is one of several researchers who have brought newsroom observational studies of journalists’ work back to the forefront of media research. Her latest book, Interactive Journalism: Hackers, Data, and Code, is a logical follow-up to her 2014 monograph, Making News at the New York Times. In the earlier book, she analyzed the challenges a legacy newspaper company faced in transforming for the digital era. In the newer volume, Usher takes a close look at the practices and people involved in the production of one type of digital journalism—interactive journalism—at 14 U.S. and international news media outlets.
Usher’s first task in the book is to delineate the sector of journalism she is examining. She defines interactive journalism as the “visual presentation of storytelling through code for multilayered, tactile user control for the purpose of news and information” (p. 3). She begins the book with a description of perhaps the most widely recognized example of the genre, the New York Times’s 2012 feature “Snowfall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek,” which won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing for John Branch but is probably best remembered for its combination of rotating visuals, integrated audio, and videos that played as users scrolled the text. In the first chapter and throughout the book, Usher is careful to distinguish this type of work from data journalism—reporting based on large, often numerical, data sets—noting that from her perspective, “data journalism is a key part of interactive journalism, but not all data journalism is interactive” (p. 22).
In the second chapter, Usher offers a brief, and necessarily incomplete, history of interactives in journalism, noting Adrian Holovaty’s work at the Lawrence (Kansas) Journal-World and the Washington Post, Northwestern University’s program for training computer programmers in journalism, and the development of the New York Times’s Interactive Technologies Team as important moments. Usher then turns, in Chapters 3 and 4, to examining the range of people who produce journalism interactives and the types of settings in which they work, drawing on field research done between 2011 and 2015.
She concludes that three key groups of people are involved in interactive journalism:
Hacker journalists, who come from programming backgrounds, work primarily as coders of journalism interactives, and may not self-identify as journalists.
Programmer journalists, who started as journalists and continue to identify that way but who have worked to become as fluent in code as in journalism.
Data journalists, relatives of old-school “computer-assisted reporters,” who are focused on the data first and may or may not know how to code.
She finds these newsworkers producing interactives in a variety of settings, from a one-person setup in 2012 at Al Jazeera English in Doha, Qatar, to teams working with varying degrees of interaction with reporters in 2012 at the Associated Press in New York and in 2013 at National Public Radio headquarters in Washington, D.C.
The work of interactive journalists is important to the field, Usher argues in Chapter 5 and in the conclusion, because it “contributes new kinds of knowledge to journalism, expanding the work product and ultimately the profession” (p. 145). (This is an especially salient observation at a moment when it seems as if the number of organizations claiming to do journalism or something quite like journalism is increasing while the number of paid jobs for journalists is contracting.) In addition, she argues, interactives built on large data sets—such as those employed in ProPublica’s 2013 project “The Opportunity Gap” on the relative equality of public school offerings across communities, states, and the United States—create a new type of knowledge, offering both a broad overview and a micro view. (In the ProPublica project, that new knowledge came from showing both state-level and local-school data, allowing readers to compare their state with others and their local school with others.)
Interactive journalism also can foster openness, Usher argues, in ways that traditional journalism generally does not. That openness can be manifest in news organizations collaborating, rather than competing, on large projects; in news organizations making whole datasets available to members of the public, along with tools to extract information from the data; or through news organizations inviting the public to contribute information that is aggregated with other information for use in interactives.
Like any book about the rapidly transforming world of 21st century journalism, this one could not help being somewhat out of date at the moment it was published, as people move and newsrooms try different types of structures and organization. For example, Aron Pilhofer, identified early in the book as the head of the New York Times’s Interactive News Technologies Team, had—as Usher notes—moved on to The Guardian by the time the book was being completed. He left that newsroom the year the book was published to take the James B. Steele Chair in Journalism Innovation at Temple University. Nevertheless, the book, especially in Chapters 3 and 4, offers a reasonably recent peek into digital newsrooms that will be useful for advanced undergraduate students, many of whom do not encounter sophisticated interactive journalism in coursework or while working for campus media.
The greatest value of this book, however, will be for graduate students and scholars of journalism production. For newer researchers, the volume provides a justification for and serves as a model of what Usher calls “hybrid ethnography,” pulling together “the best of interviewing and the best of ethnographic field research in a time frame that makes sense for a series of case studies” (p. 209). This meaning, explained in a 10-page method section at the book’s end, is different from that given to “hybrid ethnography” by European media scholars Gabriels and Bauwens, who use the term to refer to ethnography conducted partly online and partly in real life. 1 Usher’s conception, however, will be useful for those planning research within multiple organizations as it emphasizes “maximizing ethnographic observation within a compressed time” (p. 210), conducting one-on-one interviews, and collecting a variety of physical and digital documents. The paragraphs Usher devotes to the challenges that she, as an outsider to the world of coding, faced in doing the research are particularly poignant and valuable.
For future scholars of journalism production, this book will provide an important look at how interactive journalism—a subfield that seems likely to expand and transform in the coming decades—was practiced in the second decade of the 21st century. In addition, it will show future scholars what journalistic work seemed innovative and important at a time when journalism was in a period of deep transformation.