Abstract
With the New York Times’ publication of Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek in 2012, journalists and readers alike were introduced to some of Silicon Valley’s most impressive narrative techniques: interactive maps, 3D views of mountain ranges, and immersive audio and video. Taking the Pulitzer Prize–winning story as a jumping-off point, Nikki Usher expansively describes the evolution of interactive journalism as a new subspecialty in Interactive Journalism: Hackers, Data, and Code. In it, she charts the professional practices and norms that have grown alongside the technological innovations that have defined a new era in the industry.
In five chapters, Usher traces the rise and practices of the new professionals who create “a visual presentation of storytelling through code for multilayered, tactile user control for the purpose of news and information” (p. 22) whose ranks are surging in newsrooms around the world—even while those same newsrooms simultaneously suffer shrinking budgets and staff cuts. Usher describes her method—conducting interviews and making observations at more than a dozen newsrooms around the world in hours- or weeks-long stints—as a hybrid ethnography meant to maximize observations conducted over a relatively short period of time. Those observations yield the first accounting of the ways in which the field of journalism is expanding from within. While some of the individuals she describes have come from hacker communities or tech industry jobs outside the traditional boundaries of journalism, Usher argues that the rise of the interactive journalist represents an expansion of the field by journalists rather than an incursion into the field by Silicon Valley.
Integral to her contention that we’re witnessing an industry expansion is Andrew Abbott’s concept of professionalism, which holds that professions arise from the tension between differing notions of how they should be enacted. By extension, Usher would prefer to wrestle with the question of what happens when a variety of people called journalists hash out how their work should be done rather than if those people constitute a profession itself. Again and again, she finds evidence that even these newest kinds of journalists return to enduring elements of the field. She writes, “[I]t is also important to remember that one of the essential aspects of journalism that unites interactive journalism with what has come before is narrative” (p. 179). Interactive journalists offer new perspectives on their industry and perhaps new ways to convey them, but they do not reshape its norms. Whether they are telling stories by employing an inverted pyramid or an immersive video, interactive journalists still ultimately serve traditional goals and essential components of the field.
Among the most significant contributions in this book is an effort to corral the titles, terminology, and job descriptions of a vast variety of individuals—doing anything from writing nut grafs to procuring data and rendering it visually appealing through code—into one lingua franca. She identifies hacker journalists, data journalists, and programmer journalists as distinct but related species with their own motivations, skills, and values. Hackers bring their culture of disruption and problem-solving to bear alongside programmers looking for a dynamic way to convey their reportage and data journalists who may never touch code while working with data. The various kinds of interactive journalists working differently but together to meet common editorial goals create Abbott’s productive tension, which Usher argues has expanded the field such that there is room for technological innovation: “Code as editorial has come into its own” (p. 180).
Usher argues that interactive journalists are ideally situated for the industry’s internal expansion, given that they possess the specialized technological skills that were once the exclusive province of an entirely separate field. Those skills also correlate directly to the market-related demands—better design, quicker loading—Usher argues, journalists must embrace to remain “relevant.” She argues that such specialized skills enhance interactive journalists’ authority, writing, “[A]t a time when the authority of journalism is already compromised, rebuilding trust and emphasizing the special nature of professional skills is warranted” (p. 193).
Usher ultimately encourages readers to avoid “fetishizing” interactive journalism or conceiving it as a single solution to what she has previously identified as dual crises of relevance and profitability. She acknowledges the danger in over-valorizing a data set; quantification is power that should be meted out judiciously and by those with the “analytic firepower” (p. 197) to understand what they’re doing. Journalists, she warns, may not be there yet. And yet, this expanding subspecialty of interactive journalists is uniquely positioned to reclaim the industry’s authority and relevance, she argues, by introducing new methods, more traffic, and specific expertise. This is the productive tension broadening the field from within.
That Usher is more descriptive than analytical in her articulation when it comes to describing the newsrooms she visited and the self-identification of the interactive journalists working there implies a sort of loaded ideological understanding of who can offer solutions to the crises Usher cites and who cannot. In this articulation, responsibility is shifted to journalists as individuals. Future scholars may find this an invitation to more directly interrogate who is setting demands on the field and who is setting the terms for its relevance. There is more work to be done to reveal the hidden forces of economics and the role that media ownership plays in contributing to many of the concerns at the heart of the book.
While not an explicit topic of her interrogation, Usher notes after the book’s conclusion that the structural issue of gender deserves more scrutiny in this field. The preponderance of men in tech—noted copiously in the popular and academic presses—is just one strand among many we can hope will be taken up as interactive journalism continues to expand the field. Usher’s book is an ambitious and foundational text for understanding this new subspecialty, and as such, it should beget a new generation of inquiry into the political economy and boundary issues it deftly raises.